So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]
Recovery beyond data restore
Quite frequently I see customers looking at recovery as on ability to restore data from backup which can be far from being enough to restore the whole system to operating state, especially for complex systems. Instead of looking just at data restore process you better look at the whole process which is required to bring [...]
The new cool MySQL patch has landed! Check your queries performance!
Microslow patch is used by many DBAs and developers to accurately time their queries and to catch those which run less than a second as they can also be a performance killer for a busy application. Recently I have started the development of an updated version of the patch. The basic idea is the same [...]
MySQL Quality of old and new features
Recent couple of days our team was pointed to number of bugs in MySQL 5.0 which again seriously shakes the confidence in both MySQL Quality Control and bug fix promptness. Let me just take couple of bugs as examples: Triggers broken with auto-increment columns for Innodb tables (bug 26316). As you can see this bug [...]
SpyLOG Was sold the other day, time to look back
Friends are pointing me to the article saying SpyLOG, the startup which I co-founded back in 1999 was sold the other day to the MasterHost. The amount is not disclosed but it is estimated to be $3M – amount not worth mentioning for USA market but quite decent one for Russian Internet Market. So I [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
MySQL Users Conference – Innodb
It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]
INSERT INTO … SELECT Performance with Innodb tables.
Everyone using Innodb tables probably got use to the fact Innodb tables perform non locking reads, meaning unless you use some modifiers such as LOCK IN SHARE MODE or FOR UPDATE, SELECT statements will not lock any rows while running. This is generally correct, however there a notable exception – INSERT INTO table1 SELECT * [...]

