May 20, 2013

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 [...]

Write contentions on the query cache

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables

When you process MySQL slow query logs using pt-query-digest you can store samples of each query into query_review table and historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. But it could be difficult to easily browse those tables without a good GUI tool. For the visual browsing of tables created by pt-query-digest you may [...]

Here’s a quick way to Foresee if Replication Slave is ever going to catch up and When!

If you ever had a replication slave that is severely behind, you probably noticed that it’s not catching up with a busy master at a steady pace. Instead, the “Seconds behind master” is going up and down so you can’t really tell whether the replica is catching up or not by looking at just few [...]

Recovery deleted ibdata1

Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]

Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections

The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]

Innodb Table Locks

Innodb uses row level locks right ? So if you see locked tables reported in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS you might be confused and rightfully so as Innodb table locking is a bit more complicated than traditional MyISAM table locks. Let me start with some examples. First lets run SELECT Query:

As you can [...]

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 [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy

This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]