A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
Wow. My 6 year old MySQL Bug is finally fixed in MySQL 5.6
I got the message in the morning today about the bug being fixed in MySQL 5.6.6…. which I reported in Early 2006 (while still being with MySQL) and running MySQL 4.1 I honestly thought this issue was fixed long ago as it was indeed pretty annoying. I must say I’m very impressed with Oracle team [...]
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.
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions. Here are their questions and my [...]
Recovery deleted ibdata1
Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
On Character Sets and Disappearing Tables
The MySQL manual tells us that regardless of whether or not we use “SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0″ before making schema changes, InnoDB will not allow a column referenced by a foreign key constraint to be modified in such a way that the foreign key will reference a column with a mismatched data type. For instance, if we [...]
Find and remove duplicate indexes
Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]

