While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.1.65-14.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.65-14.0 on September 4th, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.65, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.65-14.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
MySQL Upgrade Webinar Questions Followup
I did a Webinar about MySQL Upgrade – Best Practices Yesterday and there were some questions we could not answer during Webinar, following Jay’s Lead I decided to post them as a Blog Post. Q: Can you go directly MySQL 5.0 to 5.5 for MyISAM tables? MyISAM have not been getting any significant development since [...]
Building Indexes by Sorting In Innodb (AKA Fast Index Creation)
Innodb can indexes built by sort since Innodb Plugin for MySQL 5.1 which is a lot faster than building them through insertion, especially for tables much larger than memory and large uncorrelated indexes you might be looking at 10x difference or more. Yet for some reason Innodb team has chosen to use very small (just [...]
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 [...]
Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views
If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
Are larger buffers always better ?
Sometimes I see people thinking about buffers as “larger is always better” so if “large” MySQL sample configuration is designed for 2GB and they happen to have 16, they would simply multiply all/most values by 10 and hope it will work well. Obviously it does not. The least problem would be wasting memory, allocating a [...]

