May 19, 2013

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

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 [...]

Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing

We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.

Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.58, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]

Connecting orphaned .ibd files

There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]

The four fundamental performance metrics

There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]

Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions

After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]

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 [...]