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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
pt-online-schema-change and default values
June 21, 2012 By 1 Comment
When I’m doing conventional ALTER TABLE in MySQL I can ignore default value and it will be assigned based on the column type. For example this alter table sbtest add column v varchar(100) not null would work even though we do not specify default value. MySQL will assign empty string as default default value for [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
February 23, 2012 By 3 Comments
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
July 29, 2011 By 9 Comments
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL
October 25, 2010 By 8 Comments
The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha
November 2, 2009 By 19 Comments
As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment. See my previous posts on this topic: Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB I could not run all queries against InfiniDB and I met some [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
