You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle’s pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless — it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
Data mart or data warehouse?
This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis. Part 1 – Intro to OLAP Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post) Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries. [...]
Pacemaker, please meet NDB Cluster or using Pacemaker/Heartbeat to start a NDB Cluster
Customers have always asked me to make NDB Cluster starts automatically upon startup of the servers. For the ones who know NDB Cluster, it is tricky to make it starts automatically. I know at least 2 sets of scripts to manage NDB startup, ndb-initializer and from Johan configurator www.severalnines.com. If all the nodes come up [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB
Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
The perils of InnoDB with Debian and startup scripts
Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance. It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are [...]
Living with backups
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

