May 22, 2013

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views

If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]

What is innodb_support_xa?

A common misunderstanding about innodb_support_xa is that it enables user-initiated XA transactions, that is, transactions that are prepared and then committed on multiple systems, with an external transaction coordinator. This is actually not precisely what this option is for. It enables two-phase commit in InnoDB (prepare, then commit). This is necessary not only for user-initiated [...]

Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta

Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta is now available for download. This release adds additional functionality to Percona XtraBackup 1.4, the current general availability version of XtraBackup. This is a beta release. Functionality Added or Changed Support for MySQL 5.5 databases has been implemented. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) XtraBackup can now be built from the MySQL 5.1.52, MySQL 5.5.7, or Percona Server [...]

Intro to OLAP

This is the first of a series of posts about business intelligence tools, particularly OLAP (or online analytical processing) tools using MySQL and other free open source software. OLAP tools are a part of the larger topic of business intelligence, a topic that has not had a lot of coverage on MPB. Because of this, [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances

This post is the second of a series that started here. The first step to build the HA solution is to create two working instances, configure them to be EBS based and create a security group for them. A third instance, the client, will be discussed in part 7. Since this will be a proof [...]

Pacemaker, please meet NDB Cluster or using Pacemaker/Heartbeat to start a NDB Cluster

Customers have always asked me to make NDB Cluster starts automatically upon startup of the servers. For the ones who know NDB Cluster, it is tricky to make it starts automatically. I know at least 2 sets of scripts to manage NDB startup, ndb-initializer and from Johan configurator www.severalnines.com. If all the nodes come up [...]

Two Types of MySQL Users

In comments to my previous post I got number number of comments saying if MySQL would not have multiple storage engine interface it would not allow people to do various very cool stuff. And I agree with this. The question is how cool you want your database operation to be ? Visiting customers I see [...]

How to generate per-database traffic statistics using mk-query-digest

We often encounter customers who have partitioned their applications among a number of databases within the same instance of MySQL (think application service providers who have a separate database per customer organization … or wordpress-mu type of apps). For example, take the following single MySQL instance with multiple (identical) databases:

3 ways MySQL uses indexes

I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.