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 [...]
InnoDB memory allocation, ulimit, and OpenSUSE
I recently encountered an interesting case. A customer reported that mysqld crashed on start on OpenSUSE 11.2 kernel 2.6.31.12-0.2-desktop x86_64 Â with 96 GB RAM when the innodb_buffer_pool_size was set to anything more than 62 GB. I decided to try it with 76 GB. The error message was an assert due to a failed malloc() [...]
Recover BLOB fields
For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

