The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries [...]
The story of one MySQL Upgrade
October 8, 2010 By 8 Comments
I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]
Joining on range? Wrong!
May 17, 2010 By 10 Comments
The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]
Why InnoDB index cardinality varies strangely
September 28, 2009 By 5 Comments
This is a very old draft, from early 2007 in fact. At that time I started to look into something interesting with the index cardinality statistics reported by InnoDB tables. The cardinality varies because it’s derived from estimates, and I know a decent amount about that. The interesting thing I wanted to look into was [...]
Gathering queries from a server with Maatkit and tcpdump
July 1, 2009 By 23 Comments
For the last couple of months, we’ve been quietly developing a MySQL protocol parser for Maatkit. It isn’t an implementation of the protocol: it’s an observer of the protocol. This lets us gather queries from servers that don’t have a slow query log enabled, at very high time resolution. With this new functionality, it becomes [...]
Converting Character Sets
March 17, 2009 By 21 Comments
The web is going the way of utf8. Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8. Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
August 9, 2008 By 24 Comments
Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]
Recovering Innodb table Corruption
July 4, 2008 By 21 Comments
Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]
Apache PHP MySQL and Runaway Scripts
May 20, 2008 By 20 Comments
Sometimes due to programming error or due to very complex query you can get your PHP script running too long, well after user stopped waiting for the page to render and went browsing other sites. Looking at Server-Status I’ve seen scripts executing for hours sometimes which is obviously the problem – they take Apache Slot, [...]
