James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]
Logging Foreign Key errors
In the last blog post I wrote about how to log deadlock errors using Percona Toolkit. Foreign key errors have the same problems. InnoDB only logs the last error in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, so we need another similar tool in order to have historical data. pt-fk-error-logger This is a tool very [...]
Announcing Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on September 7th, 2012. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories. Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster supports tunable buffer size for fast index creation in InnoDB. This value was calculated based on the merge block size (which was hardcoded to 1 [...]
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.
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
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 [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Best kept MySQLDump Secret
Many people use mysqldump –single-transaction to get consistent backup for their Innodb tables without making database read only. In most cases it works, but did you know there are some cases when you can get table entirely missing from the backup if you use this technique ? The problem comes from the fact how MySQL’s [...]

