May 21, 2013

How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL

Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]

MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability

A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was  a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]

Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables

The title is SEO bait – you can’t do it. We’ve seen a few recurring patterns trying to achieve similar – and I thought I would share with you my favorite two: Option #1: Use a table to insert into, and grab the insert_id:

Option #2: Use a table with one just row:

How innodb_open_files affects performance

Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]

Copying InnoDB tables between servers

The feature I announced some time ago http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/06/08/impossible-possible-moving-innodb-tables-between-servers/ is now available in our latest releases of XtraBackup 0.8.1 and XtraDB-6. Now I am going to show how to use it (the video will be also available on percona.tv). Let’s take tpcc schema and running standard MySQL ® 5.0.83, and assume we want to copy order_line [...]

Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine

(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]

xtrabackup-0.4, going beta, progress meter

We added some new features to our backup tool, namely: Now we can handle log file taken during backup with size exceeding 4GB, it may happen if backup takes too long and you have a lot of updates on InnoDB tables Progress meter during recovery step, now you can see what percentage of log file [...]

How to calculate a good InnoDB log file size

Peter wrote a post a while ago about choosing a good InnoDB log file size.  Not to pick on Peter, but the post actually kind of talks about a lot of things and then doesn’t tell you how to choose a good log file size!  So I thought I’d clarify it a little. The basic [...]

MySQL 5.1 is to reach GA state – all to arms !

MySQL 5.1 was in RC stage for around 10 months now finally planned to be released as GA soon. As Monty Says MySQL 5.1.26 will be renamed as GA if no serious bugs are discovered. Lets help MySQL to ensure GA release will be indeed GA quality and support Monty in his call to ensure [...]

Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL Needs

I’m often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I’ve decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the [...]