May 21, 2013

MVCC: Transaction IDs, Log Sequence numbers and Snapshots

MySQL Storage Engines implementing Multi Version Concurrency Control have several internal identifiers related to MVCC. I see a lot of people being confused what they are and why they are needed so I decided to take a time to explain it a bit. This is general explanation, it does not corresponds to Innodb in particular [...]

Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?

I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see [...]

How to estimate time it takes Innodb to Recover ?

Today seems to be Innodb day in our Blog, but well this is the question which pops ups quite frequently in Innodb talks and during consulting engagements. It is well known to get better performance you should normally set innodb_log_file_size large. We however usually recommend caution as it may significantly increase recovery time if Innodb [...]

Innodb Double Write

One of very interesting techniques Innodb uses is technique called “doublewrite” It means Innodb will write data twice when it performs table space writes – writes to log files are done only once. So why doublewrite is needed ? It is needed to archive data safety in case of partial page writes. Innodb does not [...]

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 [...]

Innodb Fuzzy checkpointing woes

As you might know Innodb storage engines uses Fuzzy Checkpointing technique as part of it recovery strategy.  It is very nice approach which means database never needs to “stall” to perform total modified pages flush but instead flushing of dirty pages happens gradually in small chunks so database load is very even. This works great [...]