Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)
December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments
I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do
November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment
pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex. Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities. Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs. The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]
The Math of Automated Failover
September 18, 2012 By 9 Comments
There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
August 17, 2012 By 17 Comments
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections
August 6, 2012 By 14 Comments
The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]
Innodb Table Locks
July 31, 2012 By 4 Comments
Innodb uses row level locks right ? So if you see locked tables reported in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS you might be confused and rightfully so as Innodb table locking is a bit more complicated than traditional MyISAM table locks. Let me start with some examples. First lets run SELECT Query:
1 2 3 4 5 | ---TRANSACTION 12303, ACTIVE 26 sec mysql tables in use 2, locked 0 MySQL thread id 53038, OS thread handle 0x7ff759b22700, query id 3918786 localhost root Sending data select count(*) from sbtest,sbtest x Trx read view will not see trx with id >= 12304, sees < 12301 |
As you can [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes
July 25, 2012 By 6 Comments
During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
June 22, 2012 By 33 Comments
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 [...]
