I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]
Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server for Under $80
There are many reasons for wanting a small MySQL database server: You’re a uni student who wants to learn the SQL language better and needs a mini-testbox You’re a Windows user who wants to play around with Percona Server on Linux You’re a corporate application developer who wants a small SQL development & test box [...]
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:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 | mysql [localhost] {msandbox} (test) > select var55.variable_name,left(var55.variable_value,40) value55, left(var56.variable_value,40) var56 from var55 left join var56 on var55.variable_name=var56.variable_name where var55.variable_value!=var56.variable_value; +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | variable_name | value55 | var56 | +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA | OFF | ON | | PID_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/mysq | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/mysq | | CHARACTER_SETS_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.5.30-linux2.6-x86_ | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.6.10-linux-glibc2. | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_COND_INSTANCES | 1000 | 836 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_MUTEX_INSTANCES | 1000000 | 3282 | | OLD_PASSWORDS | OFF | 0 | | INNODB_STATS_ON_METADATA | ON | OFF | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_EVENTS_WAITS_HISTORY_SIZE | 10 | 5 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_EVENTS_WAITS_HISTORY_LONG_SIZE | 10000 | 100 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_RWLOCK_INSTANCES | 1000000 | 1724 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_TABLE_HANDLES | 100000 | 2223 | | INNODB_LOG_FILE_SIZE | 5242880 | 50331648 | | BASEDIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.5.30 | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.6.10 | | BACK_LOG | 50 | 80 | | OPEN_FILES_LIMIT | 1024 | 5000 | | INNODB_AUTOEXTEND_INCREMENT | 8 | 64 | | MAX_CONNECT_ERRORS | 10 | 100 | | SORT_BUFFER_SIZE | 2097152 | 262144 | | LC_MESSAGES_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.5.30-linux2.6-x86_ | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.6.10-linux-glibc2. | | MAX_ALLOWED_PACKET | 1048576 | 4194304 | | JOIN_BUFFER_SIZE | 131072 | 262144 | | TMPDIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/tmp | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/tmp | | TABLE_OPEN_CACHE | 400 | 2000 | | INNODB_VERSION | 5.5.30 | 1.2.10 | | INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_INSTANCES | 1 | 8 | | QUERY_CACHE_SIZE | 0 | 1048576 | | SLOW_QUERY_LOG_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/dpe0 | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/dpe0 | | TABLE_DEFINITION_CACHE | 400 | 1400 | | PORT | 5530 | 5610 | | QUERY_CACHE_TYPE | ON | OFF | | REPORT_PORT | 5530 | 5610 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_FILE_INSTANCES | 10000 | 1556 | | SQL_MODE | | NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION | | INNODB_OLD_BLOCKS_TIME | 0 | 1000 | | LOG_ERROR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/msan | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/msan | | VERSION_COMPILE_OS | linux2.6 | linux-glibc2.5 | | THREAD_CACHE_SIZE | 0 | 9 | | PLUGIN_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.5.30/lib/plugin/ | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.6.10/lib/plugin/ | | SYNC_RELAY_LOG | 0 | 10000 | | GENERAL_LOG_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/dpe0 | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/dpe0 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_TABLE_INSTANCES | 50000 | 445 | | SYNC_RELAY_LOG_INFO | 0 | 10000 | | SLAVE_LOAD_TMPDIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/tmp | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/tmp | | SECURE_AUTH | OFF | ON | | VERSION | 5.5.30 | 5.6.10 | | INNODB_CONCURRENCY_TICKETS | 500 | 5000 | | INNODB_PURGE_THREADS | 0 | 1 | | INNODB_OPEN_FILES | 300 | 2000 | | INNODB_DATA_FILE_PATH | ibdata1:10M:autoextend | ibdata1:12M:autoextend | | INNODB_PURGE_BATCH_SIZE | 20 | 300 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_THREAD_INSTANCES | 1000 | 224 | | SOCKET | /tmp/mysql_sandbox5530.sock | /tmp/mysql_sandbox5610.sock | | INNODB_FILE_PER_TABLE | OFF | ON | | SYNC_MASTER_INFO | 0 | 10000 | | DATADIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/ | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/ | | OPTIMIZER_SWITCH | index_merge=on,index_merge_union=on,inde | index_merge=on,index_merge_union=on,inde | +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ 56 rows in set (0.05 sec) |
Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]
Adventures in archiving
One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]
Deadline Near for BOFs and Lightning Talk Submissions for Percona Live MySQL Conference
The deadline is fast approaching to submit proposals for the Birds of a Feather Sessions (BOFs) and the Lightning Talks (presented during the Wednesday Evening Networking Reception) for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. Applications for the DotOrg Pavilion close soon as well. The deadline is February 24th for all three opportunities so [...]
Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters
One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC): what about GRA_*.log files ?
How easy is it to identify and debug Percona XtraDB Cluster replication problem ? If you are using PXC, you may have already seen in your datadirectory several log files starting with GRA_ Those files correspond to a replication failure. That means the slave thread was not able to apply one transaction. For each of [...]
Percona and the MariaDB Foundation
There have been several reports (1,2,3) describing Percona’s stance regarding the MariaDB Foundation that are not totally accurate so I though it would be worth it to describe where we stand on this and related matters. First, let me say the creation of theMariaDB Foundation is a good thing for the MariaDB Community and I’m [...]
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 [...]

