A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
Timezone and pt-table-checksum
I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE and summary counters.
INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is very powerful but often forgotten MySQL feature. It was introduced in MySQL 4.1 but I still constantly see people unaware of it. Myself I like this feature big deal because it is designed in truly MySQL style – very efficient solution for freqent task while keeping it beautiful [...]

