I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]
Be productive with the MySQL command line
December 21, 2012 By 14 Comments
Even if you are using a GUI tool to connect to your MySQL servers, one day or another, you will have to deal with the command line. So it is nice to know a few tips that can really make your work easier. Note: The commands below are only available for Unix/Linux. Using pager Most [...]
How to STOP SLAVE on Amazon RDS read replica
December 20, 2012 By 4 Comments
We are doing a migration from Amazon RDS to EC2 with a customer. This, unfortunately, involves some downtime – if you are an RDS user, you probably know you can’t replicate an RDS instance to an external server (or even EC2). While it is annoying, this post isn’t going to be a rant on how [...]
The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection
December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments
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 [...]
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 [...]
Logging Deadlock errors
September 19, 2012 By 4 Comments
The principal source of information for InnoDB diagnostics is the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS but there are some sections that are not very useful. For example, LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK only shows, as the name implies, the latest error detected. If you have 100 deadlocks per minute you will be able to see only [...]
How to lag a slave behind to avoid a disaster
September 11, 2012 By 5 Comments
MySQL Replication is useful and easy to setup. It is used for very different purposes. For example: split read and writes run data mining or reporting processes on them disaster recovery Is important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the master, for example a DROP DATABASE [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments
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 [...]
Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables
August 31, 2012 By 6 Comments
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 [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
August 17, 2012 By 17 Comments
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
