May 19, 2013

Implementing efficient counters with MySQL

On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view. The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way – they [...]

How to estimate time it takes Innodb to Recover ?

Today seems to be Innodb day in our Blog, but well this is the question which pops ups quite frequently in Innodb talks and during consulting engagements. It is well known to get better performance you should normally set innodb_log_file_size large. We however usually recommend caution as it may significantly increase recovery time if Innodb [...]

To UUID or not to UUID ?

Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]

Figuring out what limits MySQL Replication

Today I was cloning the master using LVM Snapshot and found it was taking quite a while to catch up, which highlighted replication could be the limiting factor for this system quite soon, so I decided to check what is limiting MySQL Replication speed. My first idea was to check it based on slow query [...]

Falcon Storage Engine Design Review

Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]

Trying Archive Storage Engine

Today I noticed one of server used for web request profiling stats logging is taking about 2GB per day for logs, which are written in MyISAM table without indexes. So I thought it is great to try how much archive storage engine could help me in this case.

Caching techinques

Recently Jay Pipes published great article about lazy connecting and caching which reminded me my post on this matter is well overdue. Let me start with couple of comments about Jays article. First – caching in files should be used with caution. It may be very efficient especially if number of cached objects is small [...]

Consulting for MySQL

Percona offers consulting (and training, and support, and development) services for MySQL and LAMP applications. We can help with all areas of the MySQL Server – Operations, Application Design, Custom Feature development, and so on. Please visit our company website to learn more about our MySQL consulting and other services for MySQL, our more than [...]

MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.

MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]

Descending indexing and loose index scan

Comments to my previous posts, especially this one by Gokhan inspired me to write a bit about descending indexes and about loose index scan, or what Gokhan calls “better range” support. None of these are actially related to Innodb tables in general – these are features MySQL should get for all storage engines at some [...]