May 25, 2013

Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL

Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]

MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Adventures in archiving

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

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 [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]

Recovering from a bad UPDATE statement

Did you just run an UPDATE against your 10 million row users table without a WHERE clause?  Did you know that in MySQL 5.5 that sometimes you can recover from a bad UPDATE statement?  This is possible if you are running in binlog_format=ROW ! Imagine this scenario:

We run an accidental UPDATE statement that [...]

When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?

Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:

When he ran this query:

The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]