The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]
Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers
So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
Sphinx 0.9.8 is released just in time for OSCON 2008
As you probably already seen in a post by Baron, Sphinx Release 0.9.8 is finally out, just in time for OSCON 2008. Even though it is “minor release” if you look at the number, it is major release in practice (and you can view snapshots as minor releases). The changes since 0.9.7 are dramatic with [...]
Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot
We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]
Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!
For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]
Managing Slave Lag with MySQL Replication
The question I often get is how far MySQL may fall behind and how to keep replication from lagging. The lag you will see will vary a lot from application to the application and from load to load. Plus what is the most important within same application the lag will likely have spikes – most [...]
PHP Large result sets and summary tables.
We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security. One of the process web [...]
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 [...]

