May 21, 2013

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection

This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.

Replication of MEMORY (HEAP) Tables

Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do not play well with replication.

Estimating Replication Capacity

It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]

Extending Index for Innodb tables can hurt performance in a surprising way

One schema optimization we often do is extending index when there are queries which can use more key part. Typically this is safe operation, unless index length increases dramatically queries which can use index can also use prefix of the new index are they ? It turns there are special cases when this is not [...]

Should I buy a Fast SSD or more memory?

While a scale-out solution has traditionally been popular for MySQL, it’s interesting to see what room we now have to scale up – cheap memory, fast storage, better power efficiency.  There certainly are a lot of options now – I’ve been meeting about a customer/week using Fusion-IO cards.  One interesting choice I’ve seen people make [...]

XtraDB feature: save / restore buffer pool

We recently released XtraDB-9, and while we did not highlight it in announcement, the release-making feature is ability to save and restore InnoDB buffer pool. The idea is not new and was originally developed by Jeremy Cole (sorry, I do not have the link on hands) some time ago, and now we implemented it in [...]

Star Schema Bechmark: InfoBright, InfiniDB and LucidDB

In my previous rounds with DataWarehouse oriented engines I used single table without joins, and with small (as for DW) datasize (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/). Addressing these issues, I took Star Schema Benchmark, which is TPC-H modification, and tried run queries against InfoBright, InfiniDB, LucidDB and MonetDB. I did not get results for MonetDB, will [...]

table_cache negative scalability

Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]

MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3

This is part 3 of our series.  In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database.  The [...]