May 18, 2013

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]

How long Innodb Shutdown may take

How long it may take MySQL with Innodb tables to shut down ? It can be quite a while. In default configuration innodb_fast_shutdown=ON the main job Innodb has to do to complete shutdown is flushing dirty buffers. The number of dirty buffers in the buffer pool varies depending on innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct as well as workload and [...]

Getting around optimizer limitations with an IN() list

There was a discussion on LinkedIn one month ago that caught my eye: Database search by “within x number of miles” radius? Anyone out there created a zipcode database and created a “search within x numer of miles” function ? Thankful for any tips you can throw my way.. J A few people commented that [...]

Star Schema Bechmark: InfoBright, InfiniDB and LucidDB

In my previous rounds with DataWarehouse oriented engines I used single table without joins, and with small (as for DW) datasize (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/). Addressing these issues, I took Star Schema Benchmark, which is TPC-H modification, and tried run queries against InfoBright, InfiniDB, LucidDB and MonetDB. I did not get results for MonetDB, will [...]

Effect of adaptive_flushing

I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]

How (not) to find unused indexes

I’ve seen a few people link to an INFORMATION_SCHEMA query to be able to find any indexes that have low cardinality, in an effort to find out what indexes should be removed.  This method is flawed – here’s the first reason why:

The cardinality of status index is woeful, but provided that the application [...]

Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers

I spend large portion of my life working on MySQL Performance Optimization and so MySQL Optimizer is quite important to me. For probably last 10 years I chased first Monty and later Igor with Optimizer complains and suggestions. Here are some general ideas which I think can help to make optimizer in MySQL, MariaDB or [...]

Gathering queries from a server with Maatkit and tcpdump

For the last couple of months, we’ve been quietly developing a MySQL protocol parser for Maatkit. It isn’t an implementation of the protocol: it’s an observer of the protocol. This lets us gather queries from servers that don’t have a slow query log enabled, at very high time resolution. With this new functionality, it becomes [...]

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 [...]

Looking for MySQL 4.0 Support post EOL ?

As Giuseppe just reminded MySQL 4.0 is reaching its end of life in about 2 weeks from now. When it becomes unsupported by MySQL via normal support agreements together with 3.23 version. At Percona we do not have such restriction and we will continue to support your environment even if you’re still on MySQL 4 [...]