We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
What exactly is read_rnd_buffer_size
Looking for documentation for read_rnd_buffer_size you would find descriptions such as “The read_rnd_buffer_size is used after a sort, when reading rows in sorted order. If you use many queries with ORDER BY, upping this can improve performance” which is cool but it does not really tell you how exactly read_rnd_buffer_size works as well as which [...]
Top 5 Wishes for MySQL
About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]
Interesting MySQL and PostgreSQL Benchmarks
I had found pile of MySQL and PostgreSQL benchmarks on various platforms which I have not seen before. Very interesting reading. It does not share too much information about how MySQL or PostgreSQL was configured or about queries. Furthermore MySQL and PostgreSQL has a bit different implementations (ie SubQueries avoided for MySQL) so do not [...]
Opening Tables scalability
I was restarting MySQL on box with 50.000 of Innodb tables and again it took couple of hours to reach decent performance because of “Opening Tables” stage was taking long. Part of the problem is Innodb is updating stats on each table open which is possibly expensive operation, but really it is only great test [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]

