While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not [...]
How to load large files safely into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE
Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key [...]
MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 Upgrade performance regressions
This week I already had two serious performance regression cases when upgrading from MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 to MySQL 5.0. By serious I mean several times performance difference not just 5-10% you often see for simple queries due to generally fatter code. The problem in both cases was MySQL 5.0 broken group commit bug. First [...]
MySQL Slow query log in the table
As of MySQL 5.1 get MySQL slow query log logged in mysql.slow_log table instead of the file as you had in previous versions. We rarely would use this feature as it is incompatible with our slow query analyses patch and tools Fixing this is not trivial while staying 100% compatible to standard format as TIME [...]

