Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]
MySQL should have dynamic durability settings
April 8, 2008 By 4 Comments
If you’re using Innodb tables MySQL has innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit variable which defines how durable your transactions are. If you have high durability requirements you set it to 1 and log records are pushed directly to the disk on transaction commit. If you do not bother loosing come committed transactions you can set it to 0 and [...]
Working with large data sets in MySQL
July 5, 2007 By 12 Comments
What does working with large data sets in mySQL teach you ? Of course you have to learn a lot about query optimization, art of building summary tables and tricks of executing queries exactly as you want. I already wrote about development and configuration side of the problem so I will not go to details [...]
Small things are better
October 8, 2006 By 15 Comments
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 [...]
Innodb Double Write
August 4, 2006 By 24 Comments
One of very interesting techniques Innodb uses is technique called “doublewrite” It means Innodb will write data twice when it performs table space writes – writes to log files are done only once. So why doublewrite is needed ? It is needed to archive data safety in case of partial page writes. Innodb does not [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
July 30, 2006 By 30 Comments
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size
July 3, 2006 By 12 Comments
If you’re doing significant amount of writes to Innodb tables decent size of innodb_log_file_size is important for MySQL Performance. However setting it too large will increase recovery time, so in case of MySQL crash or power failure it may take long time before MySQL Server is operational again. So how to find the optimal combination [...]
Using MyISAM in production
June 17, 2006 By 36 Comments
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
