Few people realize that Galera/Percona XtraDB (PXC) replication can be encrypted via SSL for secure transfer of your replicated data. Setting this up is actually quite easy to do and probably will look familiar to a lot of people. Setting up SSL and Galera Create and propagate a single key/cert pair First, we create a [...]
How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary
To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from [...]
Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table
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! [...]
Full table scan vs full index scan performance
Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]
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 [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
Recovery after DROP & CREATE
In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `actor`; /*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client = @@character_set_client */; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */; CREATE TABLE `actor` ( `actor_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `first_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_update` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`actor_id`), KEY `idx_actor_last_name` (`last_name`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=201 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = @saved_cs_client */; |
If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
On Character Sets and Disappearing Tables
The MySQL manual tells us that regardless of whether or not we use “SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0″ before making schema changes, InnoDB will not allow a column referenced by a foreign key constraint to be modified in such a way that the foreign key will reference a column with a mismatched data type. For instance, if we [...]
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 [...]

