May 25, 2013

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Feature preview: Compact backups in Percona XtraBackup

We continue to improve Percona XtraBackup, and today I would like to give a preview for one feature which comes in next Percona XtraBackup 2.1 release. This feature is “Compact backups”, and let me explain what it does. As you may know InnoDB PK (Primary Key) contains all data, and all secondary indexes are only [...]

MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell

Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]

Write contentions on the query cache

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Improved InnoDB fast index creation

One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]

Make your file system error resilient

One of the typical problems I see setting up ext2/3/4 file system is sticking to defaults when it comes to behavior on errors. By default these filesystems are configured to Continue when error (such as IO error or meta data inconsistency) is discovered which can continue spreading corruption. This manifests itself in a worst way [...]

Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, April 4th

Here’s the weekly review of Percona Server and XtraBackup news. Before I begin, let me briefly address a common question. We are sometimes asked about our plans in light of developments in the market such as MySQL 5.5, MariaDB, Drizzle, etc. The short answer is that we’re very happy with Oracle’s GPL’ed MySQL releases as [...]

Pretty-formatted index fragmentation with xtrabackup

The xtrabackup compiled C binary (as distinct from XtraBackup, which is the combination of the C binary and the Perl script) has support for printing out stats on InnoDB tables and indexes. This can be useful to examine whether you’d benefit from “defragmenting” your MySQL database with OPTIMIZE TABLE, although I have not determined firm [...]

Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics

I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]