Well, it happened again… Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net. While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time. At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]
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 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Dynamic row format for MEMORY tables
The latest Percona Server release has one new feature: now MEMORY tables can have BLOB and TEXT columns, and VARCHAR columns will not waste space due to implicit extension to CHAR.
Innodb Caching (part 2)
Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
What does Handler_read_rnd mean?
MySQL’s SHOW STATUS command has two counters that are often confusing and result in “what does that mean?” questions: Handler_read_rnd Handler_read_rnd_next As I understand it, there is some historical context to the choice of names here, hearkening back to before I was involved with MySQL, way back when it was a wrapper around ISAM tables [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 1
All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why? Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application? Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who [...]
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]

