May 22, 2013

Multi-Column IN clause – Unexpected MySQL Issue

We have an application which stores massive amount of urls. To save on indexes instead of using URL we index CRC32 of the URL which allows to find matching urls quickly. There is a bit of chance there would be some false positives but these are filtered out after reading the data so it works [...]

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

MySQL Users Conference – Innodb

It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]

PBXT benchmarks

The PBXT Storage Engine (http://www.primebase.com/xt/) is getting stable and we decided to benchmark it in different workloads. This time I tested only READ queries, similar to ones in benchmark InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1) The difference is I used new sysbench with Lua scripting language, so all queries were scripted for sysbench.

Falcon Storage Engine Design Review

Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]

InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1

Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]

Small things are better

Yesterday I had fun time repairing 1.5Tb ext3 partition, containing many millions of files. Of course it should have never happened – this was decent PowerEdge 2850 box with RAID volume, ECC memory and reliable CentOS 4.4 distribution but still it did. We had “journal failed” message in kernel log and filesystem needed to be [...]

Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables

I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]

Why Index could refuse to work ?

Have you ever seen index which refused to be used even if there is every reason for it to work (from the glance view):

Why on the earth index would not be used you would think, even if MySQL is mentioning it in “possible keys” ? Should you try to force it ?

Using UNION to implement loose index scan in MySQL

One little known fact about MySQL Indexing, however very important for successfull MySQL Performance Optimization is understanding when exactly MySQL is going to use index and how it is going to do them. So if you have table people with KEY(age,zip) and you will run query something like SELECT name FROM people WHERE age BETWEEN [...]