May 20, 2013

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.

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]

Innodb Table Locks

Innodb uses row level locks right ? So if you see locked tables reported in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS you might be confused and rightfully so as Innodb table locking is a bit more complicated than traditional MyISAM table locks. Let me start with some examples. First lets run SELECT Query:

As you can [...]

Why ALTER TABLE shows as two transactions in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS

When executing an ALTER TABLE, InnoDB (and XtraDB) will create two InnoDB transactions: One transaction is created when the table being ALTERed is locked by the server. This will show up as something like “TABLE LOCK table `schema`.`table_name` trx id XXXX lock mode S” in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. Another is created when adding or [...]

Flexviews is a working scalable database transactional memory example

http://Flexvie.ws fully implements a method for creating materialized views for MySQL data sets. The tool is for MySQL, but the methods are database agnostic. A materialized view is an analogue of software transactional memory. You can think of this as database transactional memory, or as database state distributed over time, but in an easy way [...]

Multiple purge threads in Percona Server 5.1.56 and MySQL 5.6.2

Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete.  In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread.  Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]

Percona is hiring a consultant

We’re hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications: Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just “certified” — years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption. Expert knowledge of [...]

Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT

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 [...]

Announcing Percona XtraDB Storage Engine: a Drop-in Replacement for Standard InnoDB

Today we officially announce our new storage engine, “Percona XtraDB“, which is based on the InnoDB storage engine. It’s 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in [...]

Monty unviels Maria and starts Blogging

This weekend we’re hearing great news from Michael “Monty” Widenius – one of the Fathers of MySQL. Monty finally found a time to create his own blog with very descriptive name Monty Says. At the same time Monty finally announces Maria – the MyISAM successor storage engine he has been working for last few years. [...]