One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
November 6, 2011 By 4 Comments
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
SELECT UNION Results INTO OUTFILE
September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick tip I know some of us has overlooked at some point. When doing SELECT … UNION SELECT, where do you put the the INTO OUTFILE clause? On the first SELECT, on the last or somewhere else? The manual has the answer here, to quote: Only the last SELECT statement can use INTO [...]
Dynamic row format for MEMORY tables
September 6, 2011 By 5 Comments
The latest Percona Server release has one new feature: now MEMORY tables can have BLOB and TEXT columns, and VARCHAR columns will not waste space due to implicit extension to CHAR.
Shard-Query EC2 images available
May 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
The four fundamental performance metrics
April 27, 2011 By 15 Comments
There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]
Innodb row size limitation
April 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
April 4, 2011 By 20 Comments
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 [...]
Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies
February 14, 2011 By 18 Comments
Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
