May 18, 2013

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell

Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

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 [...]

When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?

Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:

When he ran this query:

The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]

Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables

When you process MySQL slow query logs using pt-query-digest you can store samples of each query into query_review table and historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. But it could be difficult to easily browse those tables without a good GUI tool. For the visual browsing of tables created by pt-query-digest you may [...]

Wow. My 6 year old MySQL Bug is finally fixed in MySQL 5.6

I got the message in the morning today about the bug being fixed in MySQL 5.6.6…. which I reported in Early 2006 (while still being with MySQL) and running MySQL 4.1 I honestly thought this issue was fixed long ago as it was indeed pretty annoying. I must say I’m very impressed with Oracle team [...]

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 [...]