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 [...]
Performance gotcha of MySQL memory tables
One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I’m going to write about. There is [...]
InnoDB in self-compiled MySQL 5.1
If you like to compile MySQL from sources by yourself, for different needs, like debugging, testing etc, you probably can face this issue. What I usually do to fast compile and test is
1 2 3 | ./configure --prefix=/dir/to/mysql make make install |
and then, for example, load the dump of InnoDB from previous version:
1 | mysql testdatabase < dump.sql |
I bet you will not notice all your [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
MySQL Prepared Statements
If you care about archiving best performance in your application using MySQL you should learn about prepared statements. These do not neccesary provide performance beneft but they may, they also have other benefits. As a quick introduction – before MySQL 4.1 there were only textual statements and textual protocol for data transfer – query was [...]
Using MyISAM in production
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]

