First, a thank you to everyone who attended the webinar Today, I appreciate your time and nice comments. As promised, here are answers to questions that couldn’t be answered during the talk: Q: How do you install the tools? The manual has full details, but it’s important to know that the latest release for [...]
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 [...]
Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU
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 [...]
Replaying database load with Percona Playback
If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]
How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?
One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]
When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?
Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | CREATE TABLE foo ( id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, uid INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, update_time DATETIME NOT NULL, .... INDEX `uid` (uid, update_time), INDEX `bar` (some_other_columns) .... ) ENGINE=InnoDB; |
When he ran this query:
1 | SELECT MIN(update_time) FROM foo WHERE update_time IS NOT NULL AND update_time <> '0000-00-00 00:00:00'; |
The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]
Differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ transaction isolation levels
As an instructor with Percona I’m sometimes asked about the differences between the READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation levels. There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking.
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
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 [...]
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 [...]
Recovery deleted ibdata1
Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]

