I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most [...]
InnoDB: look after fragmentation
One problem made me puzzled for couple hours, but it was really interesting to figure out what’s going on. So let me introduce problem at first. The table is
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | CREATE TABLE `c` ( `tracker_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `username` char(20) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL, `time_id` date NOT NULL, `block_id` int(10) unsigned default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`tracker_id`,`username`,`time_id`), KEY `block_id` (`block_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB |
Table has 11864696 rows and takes Data_length: 698,351,616 bytes on disk The problem is that after restoring table from mysqldump, the query that scans data [...]
Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup
If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]
Beware of MySQL Data Truncation
Here is nice gotcha which I’ve seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons. Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id [...]
Some little known facts about Innodb Insert Buffer
Despite being standard Innodb feature forever Insert Buffers remains some kind of mysterious thing for a lot of people, so let me try to explain thing a little bit. Innodb uses insert buffer to “cheat” and not to update index leaf pages when at once but “buffer” such updates so several updates to the same [...]
Drilling down to the source of the problem
I had an interesting tuning case few days ago. The system serving high traffic using Innodb tables would be stalling every so often causing even very simple queries both reads and writes taking long time to complete, with progress almost paused (dropping from thousands to tens of queries per second). On the surface the problem [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]
MySQL File System Fragmentation Benchmarks
Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found:
Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II
I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]

