May 18, 2013

MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer

A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]

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. [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

Hidden columns of query_review_history table

You can use pt-query-digest to process a MySQL slow query log and store historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. According to its official documentation you can populate many columns in that table but there are other important ones such as ‘user’, ‘host’, ‘db’ which are not included by default. I will explain [...]

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 [...]

Percona Testing: Innodb crash / recovery tests available

Not everyone may know this, but there are precious few innodb crash recovery tests available. Some folks have noticed this and asked for something to be done about it, but unfortunately, no tests have been created for the main MySQL branch. The MySQL at Facebook branch has a number of tests that are quite interesting.  [...]

Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit

It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature.  Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.

Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance

When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]

MySQL versions shootout

As part of work on “High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition”, Baron asked me to compare different MySQL version in some simple benchmark, but on decent hardware. So why not.

Getting MySQL Core file on Linux

Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]