I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
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 [...]
Innodb Table Locks
Innodb uses row level locks right ? So if you see locked tables reported in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS you might be confused and rightfully so as Innodb table locking is a bit more complicated than traditional MyISAM table locks. Let me start with some examples. First lets run SELECT Query:
1 2 3 4 5 | ---TRANSACTION 12303, ACTIVE 26 sec mysql tables in use 2, locked 0 MySQL thread id 53038, OS thread handle 0x7ff759b22700, query id 3918786 localhost root Sending data select count(*) from sbtest,sbtest x Trx read view will not see trx with id >= 12304, sees < 12301 |
As you can [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]
Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query
Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]

