May 20, 2013

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

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 [...]

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:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Unexpected problem with triggers and mysqldump

Some time ago, I had to convert all tables of a database from MyISAM to InnoDB on a new server. The plan was to take a logical dump on the master, exporting separately the schema and the data, then edit the CREATE TABLE statements to ensure all tables are created with InnoDB, and reload everything [...]

Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)

Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:

The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]

Feature preview: Compact backups in Percona XtraBackup

We continue to improve Percona XtraBackup, and today I would like to give a preview for one feature which comes in next Percona XtraBackup 2.1 release. This feature is “Compact backups”, and let me explain what it does. As you may know InnoDB PK (Primary Key) contains all data, and all secondary indexes are only [...]

Fun with the MySQL pager command

Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]

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 Toolkit 2.1.8 released today with beta support for MySQL 5.6

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta). In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid [...]

How does MySQL Replication really work?

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]