Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete. In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread. Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 1: insert performance
March 15, 2011 By 37 Comments
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud-hosted MySQL solution. I’ve had some clients hitting performance limitations on standard EC2 servers with EBS volumes (see SSD versus EBS death match), and one of them wanted to evaluate RDS as a replacement. It is built on the same technologies, but the hardware and networking are supposed [...]
Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies
February 14, 2011 By 18 Comments
Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
November 15, 2010 By 18 Comments
Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Implementing Parallel Replication in MySQL
November 8, 2010 By 3 Comments
Based on discussions with several clients, we are strongly considering implementing a limited form of parallel replication. Single-threaded replication is one of the most severe limitations in the MySQL server. We have a brief outline of the ideas at this wiki blueprint. So far, the “binlog order” idea is the only one that is workable. [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection
October 27, 2010 By 14 Comments
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.
MySQL Limitations Part 3: Subqueries
October 25, 2010 By 21 Comments
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1, 2). This post is about subqueries, which in some cases execute outside-in instead of inside-out as users expect.
MySQL Limitations Part 2: The Binary Log
October 23, 2010 By 11 Comments
This is the second in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1). In the first part, I wrote about single-threaded replication. Upstream from the replicas is the primary, which enables replication by writing a so-called “binary log” of events that modify data in the server. The binary log is [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 1: Single-Threaded Replication
October 20, 2010 By 16 Comments
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it [...]
