I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Blob Storage in Innodb
I’m running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it. How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format. But before we look into how BLOBs are really stored lets see what misconception [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]

