Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.14-20.5 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.14, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.14-20.5 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]
A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file
June 3, 2011 By 8 Comments
A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]
Innodb row size limitation
April 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
April 4, 2011 By 20 Comments
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
March 8, 2011 By 6 Comments
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
November 22, 2010 By 2 Comments
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
November 9, 2010 By 12 Comments
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Converting Character Sets
March 17, 2009 By 21 Comments
The web is going the way of utf8. Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8. Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]
JOIN Performance & Charsets
October 21, 2008 By 2 Comments
We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you’ve inherited a schema that you can’t change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries. Take [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
August 12, 2008 By 10 Comments
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
