May 18, 2013

Webinar on Read/Write Splitting with PHP

I’ll be presenting a webinar next Wednesday, January 23 at 10 a.m. (Pacific Time), about issues application developers should think about for scaling out read-query traffic using multiple MySQL instances in a replication pair. Specifically, about the care we have to take because replication is asynchronous.  This means the slave  may not have current data [...]

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 [...]

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables

When you process MySQL slow query logs using pt-query-digest you can store samples of each query into query_review table and historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. But it could be difficult to easily browse those tables without a good GUI tool. For the visual browsing of tables created by pt-query-digest you may [...]

SQL Injection Questions Followup

I presented a webinar today about SQL Injection, to try to clear up some of the misconceptions that many other blogs and articles have about this security risk.  You can register for the webinar even now that I’ve presented it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording, which will be available soon. During [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

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 [...]

MariaDB 5.3 is released as GA!

Congratulations to Monty Program and the many community contributors for releasing the GA version of MariaDB 5.3. We were in our annual all-staff meeting last week, so we are a little slow to blog about this and acknowledge the great work that has gone into MariaDB. Better late than never, I hope. Before I discuss [...]

Time for Zero Administration effort at MySQL ?

Preparing Optimizing MySQL Configuration talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I noticed how many Variables did MySQL get over years – it is pushing 400 these days even if we do not count variables/options which do not have matching SHOW VARIABLES value, and settings done by changing tables rather than command line options (like much [...]

MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache

or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]