Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
Connecting orphaned .ibd files
There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
Rare evil MySQL Bug
There is the rare bug which I ran into every so often. Last time I’ve seen it about 3 years ago on MySQL 4.1 and I hoped it is long fixed since… but it looks like it is not. I now get to see MySQL 5.4.2 in the funny state. When you see bug happening [...]
Improving InnoDB recovery time
Speed of InnoDB recovery is known and quite annoying problem. It was discussed many times, see: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29847 http://dammit.lt/2008/10/26/innodb-crash-recovery/ This is problem when your InnoDB crashes, it may takes long time to start. Also it affects restoring from backup (both LVM and xtrabackup / innobackup) In this is simple test, I do crash mysql during in-memory [...]
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 [...]
No more MySQL Crash Safe Replication in 5.0 ?
As you might know even if you’re only using Innodb tables your replication is not completely crash safe – if Slave MySQL Server crashes/power goes down it is likely for relay logs to run out of sync (they are not synced to the disk) plus position on the master which slave remembers becomes stale. During [...]
What is the longest part of Innodb Recovery Process ?
In MySQL 4.1 and above the longest part of recovery after crash for Innodb tables could be UNDO stage – it was happening in foreground and was basically unbound – if you have large enough transaction which needed to be undone this could take long hours. REDO stage on other hand always could be regulated [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]
MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 Upgrade performance regressions
This week I already had two serious performance regression cases when upgrading from MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 to MySQL 5.0. By serious I mean several times performance difference not just 5-10% you often see for simple queries due to generally fatter code. The problem in both cases was MySQL 5.0 broken group commit bug. First [...]

