One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest. This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input. You need a large [...]
MySQL 5.6.7-RC in tpcc-mysql benchmark
MySQL 5.6.7 RC is there, so I decided to test how it performs in tpcc-mysql workload from both performance and stability standpoints. I can’t say that my experience was totally flawless, I bumped into two bugs: MySQL 5.6.7 locks itself on CREATE INDEX MySQL 5.6.7-rc crashed under tpcc-mysql workload But at the end, is not [...]
Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes
James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]
Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?
Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
MySQL Upgrade Webinar Questions Followup
I did a Webinar about MySQL Upgrade – Best Practices Yesterday and there were some questions we could not answer during Webinar, following Jay’s Lead I decided to post them as a Blog Post. Q: Can you go directly MySQL 5.0 to 5.5 for MyISAM tables? MyISAM have not been getting any significant development since [...]
ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size
Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Joining many tables in MySQL – optimizer_search_depth
Working on customer case today I ran into interesting problem – query joining about 20 tables (thank you ORM by joining all tables connected with foreign keys just in case) which would take 5 seconds even though in the read less than 1000 rows and doing it completely in memory. The plan optimizer picked was [...]

