I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
February 17, 2012 By 10 Comments
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
April 10, 2011 By 64 Comments
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 [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
Getting History of Table Sizes in MySQL
December 8, 2010 By 13 Comments
One data point which is very helpful but surprisingly few people have is the history of the table sizes. Projection of data growth is very important component for capacity planning and simply watching the growth of space used on partition is not very helpful. Now as MySQL 5.0+ has information schema collecting and keeping this [...]
Intro to OLAP
July 12, 2010 By 10 Comments
This is the first of a series of posts about business intelligence tools, particularly OLAP (or online analytical processing) tools using MySQL and other free open source software. OLAP tools are a part of the larger topic of business intelligence, a topic that has not had a lot of coverage on MPB. Because of this, [...]
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
A workaround for the performance problems of TEMPTABLE views
May 19, 2010 By 7 Comments
MySQL supports two different algorithms for views: the MERGE algorithm and the TEMPTABLE algorithm. These two algorithms differ greatly. A view which uses the MERGE algorithm can merge filter conditions into the view query itself. This has significant performance advantages over TEMPTABLE views. A view which uses the TEMPTABLE algorithm will have to compute the [...]
Can we get faster expression handling in MySQL
March 30, 2010 By 7 Comments
Andrew from Sphinx continues to work on improving SQL (or SphinxQL) support and now he published benchmarks comparing arithmetic expression handling in Sphinx to one in MySQL. The result ? Sphinx scored 3x to 20x faster. Andrew goes to explain results are not 100% comparable (as we can see in the table results are even [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
