Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]
pt-online-schema-change and default values
June 21, 2012 By 1 Comment
When I’m doing conventional ALTER TABLE in MySQL I can ignore default value and it will be assigned based on the column type. For example this alter table sbtest add column v varchar(100) not null would work even though we do not specify default value. MySQL will assign empty string as default default value for [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
June 20, 2012 By 63 Comments
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
May 30, 2012 By 2 Comments
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 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
March 21, 2012 By 10 Comments
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
February 23, 2012 By 3 Comments
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Percona testing: Quick test clusters with kewpie!
January 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster seems to have generated a fair bit of interest : ) Although the documentation contains more formal instructions for setting up a test cluster, I wanted to share a quick way to set up an ad-hoc cluster on a single machine to help people play with this (imho) rather [...]
Hijacking Innodb Foreign Keys
January 2, 2012 By 2 Comments
I guess I’m first to post in 2012 so Happy New Year all blog readers ! Now back to HardCore MySQL business – foreign Keys. MySQL supported Foreign Keys for Innodb for many years, yet rudimentary support initially added in MySQL 3.23.44 have not been improved in new releases as much as I’d like. We [...]
