May 23, 2013

What does Handler_read_rnd mean?

MySQL’s SHOW STATUS command has two counters that are often confusing and result in “what does that mean?” questions: Handler_read_rnd Handler_read_rnd_next As I understand it, there is some historical context to the choice of names here, hearkening back to before I was involved with MySQL, way back when it was a wrapper around ISAM tables [...]

InnoDB: look after fragmentation

One problem made me puzzled for couple hours, but it was really interesting to figure out what’s going on. So let me introduce problem at first. The table is

Table has 11864696 rows and takes Data_length: 698,351,616 bytes on disk The problem is that after restoring table from mysqldump, the query that scans data [...]

MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 1

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why?  Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application?  Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who [...]

Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup

If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]

My “hot” list for next InnoDB features

Many InnoDB scalability problems seem fixed in InnoDB-plugin-1.0.3 and I expect InnoDB-plugin will run fine on 16-24 cores boxes for many workloads. And now it is time to look on systems with 32GB+ of RAM which are not rare nowadays. Working with real customer systems I have wish-list of features I would like to see [...]

High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL

We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work.  The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]

Real-Life Use Case for “Barracuda” InnoDB File Format

In one of his recent posts Vadim already gave some information about possible benefits from using new InnoDB file format but in this post I’d like to share some real-life example how compression in InnoDB plugin could be useful for large warehousing tasks.

Performance gotcha of MySQL memory tables

One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I’m going to write about. There is [...]

Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II

I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]

Innodb Performance Optimization Basics

Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]