LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
How to recover deleted rows from an InnoDB Tablespace
In my previous post I explained how it could be possible to recover, on some specific cases, a single table from a full backup in order to save time and make the recovery process more straightforward. Now the scenario is worse because we don’t have a backup or the backup restore process doesn’t work. How [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Bug#12704861
As Mark pointed out, there isn’t a lot of detail in the release notes about what could potentially be a very serious problem that is fixed in MySQL 5.1.60. I’ll repeat here the full documentation from the release notes: “InnoDB Storage Engine: Data from BLOB columns could be lost if the server crashed at a precise [...]
Connecting orphaned .ibd files
There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Debugging problems with row based replication
MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*; The binlog_format variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]
Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB
Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]
Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup
If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]

