May 22, 2013

Thinking about running OPTIMIZE on your Innodb Table ? Stop!

Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get better feel for primary key and index pages and so using less space, it is just OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be best way to do it. If you’re running Innodb Plugin on [...]

Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries

Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]

Instrumentation and the cost of Foreign Keys

I occasionally get in to light arguments healthy discussions with students about whether or not to use Foreign Key constraints on InnoDB tables.  My standard response has always been: “it depends on how much of a tradeoff you are willing to make for performance. In some situations the cost can be considerable”. .. that’s when [...]

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 [...]

Percona Server version 10

Dear Community, Today we are pleased to announce the release 10 of Percona Server with XtraDB storage engine. Since the previous release 9.1 there are following changes

When should you store serialized objects in the database?

A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.

XtraDB storage engine release 1.0.6-9

Dear Community, As of today Release 9 of XtraDB storage engine is available. The release includes following new features: The release is base on 1.0.6 version of InnoDB plugin. MySQL 5.1.42 as a base release Separate purge thread and LRU dump is implemented (this feature was actually added in Release 8, but somehow it was [...]

How many partitions can you have ?

I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most [...]

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 [...]

How number of columns affects performance ?

It is pretty understood the tables which have long rows tend to be slower than tables with short rows. I was interested to check if the row length is the only thing what matters or if number of columns we have to work with also have an important role. I was interested in peak row [...]