I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]
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:
1 2 3 4 5 | ---TRANSACTION 12303, ACTIVE 26 sec mysql tables in use 2, locked 0 MySQL thread id 53038, OS thread handle 0x7ff759b22700, query id 3918786 localhost root Sending data select count(*) from sbtest,sbtest x Trx read view will not see trx with id >= 12304, sees < 12301 |
As you can [...]
Checking the subset sum set problem with set processing
Hi, Here is an easy way to run the subset sum check from SQL, which you can then distribute with Shard-Query:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 | CREATE TABLE `the list` ( `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `val` bigint(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `id` (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM; SELECT val as `val`, COUNT(DISTINCT (id)) as `cd` FROM test.data as d WHERE val in (-2,-3,-10,15,15,16) GROUP BY val; +-----+----------+----------+ | val | cd | CNT | +-----+----------+----------+ | -10 | 1 | 1 | | -3 | 1 | 1 | | -2 | 1 | 1 | | 15 | 35417088 | 35417088 | +-----+----------+----------+ 5 rows in set (40.20 sec) |
Notice there is no 16 in the list. We did not pass the check. There are enough 15s though. The distinct value count for each item in the output set, must at least [...]
What’s up with HandlerSocket?
I’ve presented at two different venues about HandlerSocket recently and the number one question that always arises is: Why hasn’t HandlerSocket become more popular than it is? Considering how fast and awesome HandlerSocket is, it’s not seeing as rapid adoption as some might expect. I theorize that there are five reasons for this:
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Recovering Innodb table Corruption
Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]
Performance gotcha of MySQL memory tables
One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I’m going to write about. There is [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]

