May 22, 2013

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6

MySQL 5.6 has an impressive list of improvements. Among them, replication checksums caught my attention as it seems that many people misunderstand the real added value of this new feature. I heard people think that with replication checksums, data integrity between the master and its replicas is now enforced. As we’ll see, it’s not that [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

Replication of the NOW() function (also, time travel)

Notice the result of the NOW() function in the following query. The query was run on a real database server and I didn’t change the clock of the server or change anything in the database configuration settings.

You may proceed to party like it is 1999. How can the NOW() function return a value [...]

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

Understanding Multi-node writing conflict metrics in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera

I have addressed previously how multi-node writing causes unexpected deadlocks in PXC, at least, it is unexpected unless you know how Galera replication works.  This is a complicated topic and I personally feel like I’m only just starting to wrap my head around it. The magic of Galera replication The short of it is that Galera [...]

Concatenating MyISAM files

Recently, I found myself involved in the migration of a large read-only InnoDB database to MyISAM (eventually packed). The only issue was that for one of the table, we were talking of 5 TB of data, 23B rows. Not small… I calculated that with something like insert into MyISAM_table… select * from Innodb_table… would take [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]