May 23, 2013

Get Me Some Query Logs!

One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest.  This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input.  You need a large [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]

Replaying database load with Percona Playback

If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]

Measuring the amount of writes in InnoDB redo logs

Choosing a good InnoDB log file size is key to InnoDB write performance. This can be done by measuring the amount of writes in the redo logs. You can find a detailed explanation in this post. To sum up, here are the main points: The redo logs should be large enough to store at most [...]

Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]

Here’s a quick way to Foresee if Replication Slave is ever going to catch up and When!

If you ever had a replication slave that is severely behind, you probably noticed that it’s not catching up with a busy master at a steady pace. Instead, the “Seconds behind master” is going up and down so you can’t really tell whether the replica is catching up or not by looking at just few [...]

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]

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 [...]

New variable slave_max_allowed_packet for slave servers

One month ago I wrote about how a big read_buffer_size could break the replication. The bug is not solved but now there is an official workaround to ease this problem using a new configuration variable: slave_max_allowed_packet This new variable will be available in 5.1.64, 5.5.26, and 5.6.6 and can establish a different limit on the [...]

DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL

Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]