May 23, 2013

Differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ transaction isolation levels

As an instructor with Percona I’m sometimes asked about the differences between the READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation levels.  There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking.

Table locks in SHOW INNODB STATUS

Quite frequently I see people confused what table locks reported by SHOW INNODB STATUS really mean. Check this out for example:

This output gives us an impression Innodb has taken table lock on test/t1 table and many people tend to think Innodb in fact in some circumstances would abandon its row level locking and [...]

READ-COMMITED vs REPETABLE-READ in tpcc-like load

Question what is better isolation level is poping up again and again. Recently it was discussed in InnoDB : Any real performance improvement when using READ COMMITED isolation level ? and in Repeatable read versus read committed for InnoDB . Serge in his post explains why READ COMMITED is better for TPCC load, so why [...]

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. [...]

Test Drive of Solid

Not so long ago Solid released solidDB for MySQL Beta 3 so I decided now is time to take a bit closer look on new transactional engine for MySQL. While my far goal is the performance and scalability testing before I wanted to look at basic transactional properties such as deadlock detection, select for update [...]

SELECT LOCK IN SHARE MODE and FOR UPDATE

Baron wrote nice article comparing locking hints in MySQL and SQL Server. In MySQL/Innodb LOCK IN SHARE MODE and SELECT FOR UPDATE are more than hints. Behavior will be different from normal SELECT statements. Here is simple example:

SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through

Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]