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)
December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments
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 [...]
Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do
November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment
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 [...]
Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU
October 27, 2012 By 6 Comments
A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
Measuring the amount of writes in InnoDB redo logs
October 8, 2012 By 4 Comments
Choosing a good InnoDB log file size is key to InnoDB write performance. This can be done by measuring the amount of writes in the redo logs. You can find a detailed explanation in this post. To sum up, here are the main points: The redo logs should be large enough to store at most [...]
Thank you for joining us at Percona Live, NYC 2012
October 7, 2012 By 1 Comment
Over 200 attendees attended last week’s Percona Live NY event. This year we structured event different than in 2011 with Tutorial Day allowing for in-depth 3 hour presentations for those looking to dive deep into specific topics. We also added an Expo Hall which allowed a lot of MySQL Ecosystem participant to meet their prospective [...]
Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO
August 28, 2012 By 3 Comments
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
August 24, 2012 By 5 Comments
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions. Here are their questions and my [...]
Meet Percona at Southeast Linux Fest
June 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Percona will be at Southeast Linux Fest tomorrow and Saturday. We’re supporting the event, and we hope to meet you there. If you’ve never been, this is a great regional show that’s grown enormously in the last few years. Peter and I will both be speaking: Peter about optimizing MySQL configuration, and I will talk [...]
How expensive is USER_STATISTICS?
June 2, 2012 By 14 Comments
One of our customers asked me whether it’s safe to enable the so-called USER_STATISTICS features of Percona Server in a heavy-use production server with many tens of thousands of tables. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it creates some new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables that add counters for activity on users, hosts, tables, indexes, and more. [...]
