Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third 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 targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
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 [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Index Condition Pushdown in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 and its performance impact
I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available [...]
MariaDB 5.3 is released as GA!
Congratulations to Monty Program and the many community contributors for releasing the GA version of MariaDB 5.3. We were in our annual all-staff meeting last week, so we are a little slow to blog about this and acknowledge the great work that has gone into MariaDB. Better late than never, I hope. Before I discuss [...]
STOP: DELETE IGNORE on Tables with Foreign Keys Can Break Replication
DELETE IGNORE suppresses errors and downgrades them as warnings, if you are not aware how IGNORE behaves on tables with FOREIGN KEYs, you could be in for a surprise. Let’s take a table with data as example, column c1 on table t2 references column c1 on table t1 – both columns have identical set of rows for [...]
Hijacking Innodb Foreign Keys
I guess I’m first to post in 2012 so Happy New Year all blog readers ! Now back to HardCore MySQL business – foreign Keys. MySQL supported Foreign Keys for Innodb for many years, yet rudimentary support initially added in MySQL 3.23.44 have not been improved in new releases as much as I’d like. We [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]

