This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]
The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection
Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Timezone and pt-table-checksum
I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
Recover BLOB fields
For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]
Why you don’t want to shard.
Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.
The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.
So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.
Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons
Efficient Boolean value storage for Innodb Tables
Sometimes you have the task of storing multiple of boolean values (yes/now or something similar) in the table and if you get many columns and many rows you may want to store them as efficient way as possible. For MyISAM tables you could use BIT(1) fields which get combined together for efficient storage:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 | CREATE TABLE `bbool` ( `b1` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b2` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b3` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b4` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b5` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b6` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b7` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b8` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b9` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b10` bit(1) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM mysql> show table status like 'bbool' \G *************************** 1. row *************************** Name: bbool Engine: MyISAM Version: 10 Row_format: Fixed Rows: 10 Avg_row_length: 7 Data_length: 70 Max_data_length: 1970324836974591 Index_length: 1024 Data_free: 0 Auto_increment: NULL Create_time: 2008-04-24 00:41:01 Update_time: 2008-04-24 00:45:40 Check_time: NULL Collation: latin1_swedish_ci Checksum: NULL Create_options: Comment: 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!
For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]
Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB Version 0.1 Released
As Peter mentioned in one of previous posts, we’ve done huge work developing robust strategies of InnoDB data recovery to provide our customers effective data recovery services and one of major parts of these strategies is our toolkit for InnoDB data recovery. Today I’m proud to announce its first public release which was used to [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

