May 24, 2013

MySQL optimizer: ANALYZE TABLE and Waiting for table flush

The MySQL optimizer makes the decision of what execution plan to use based on the information provided by the storage engines. That information is not accurate in some engines like InnoDB and they are based in statistics calculations therefore sometimes some tune is needed. In InnoDB these statistics are calculated automatically, check the following blog [...]

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 on January 15th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.66, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3 on January 8th, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.28, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Find unused indexes

I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]

ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size

Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]