Being completely distributed team, meetings are very important for us and this time we went to the Turkey in the end of October (yes, yes I could be faster with sharing photos) This went we went to Turkey, Antalya region, which is a destination which is very easy to reach from Europe as well as [...]
MySQL for Hosting Providers – how do they manage ?
Working with number of hosting providers I always wonder how do they manage to keep things up given MySQL gives you so little ways to really restrict how much resources single user can consume. I have written over a year ago about 10+ ways to crash or overload MySQL and since that people have come [...]
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
JOIN Performance & Charsets
We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you’ve inherited a schema that you can’t change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries. Take [...]
Fighting MySQL Replication Lag
The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]
How quickly you should expect to see bugs fixed
Over a year ago I wrote about pretty nasty Innodb Recovery Bug. I ran in the same situation again (different system, different customer) and went to see the status of the bug… and it is still open. You may thing it is minor issue but in fact with large buffer pool this bug makes database [...]
Should we proclaim MySQL Community Edition Dead ?
We were chatting with Jeremy Cole today and he brought to my attention last version of MySQL Community Eddition (5.0.51) was released in November 2007 – over 7 months ago. MySQL 5.0.51a and MySQL 5.0.51b security fixes were released but these can’t be considered proper releases. If we look at the old Kaj’s Announcement we [...]
INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables in the InnoDB pluggable storage engine
Much has been written about the new InnoDB pluggable storage engine, which Innobase released at the MySQL conference last month. We’ve written posts ourselves about its fast index creation capabilities and the compressed row format, and how that affects performance. One of the nice things they added in this InnoDB release is INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables that [...]
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]

