May 25, 2013

Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB

After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Fun with the MySQL pager command

Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Concatenating MyISAM files

Recently, I found myself involved in the migration of a large read-only InnoDB database to MyISAM (eventually packed). The only issue was that for one of the table, we were talking of 5 TB of data, 23B rows. Not small… I calculated that with something like insert into MyISAM_table… select * from Innodb_table… would take [...]

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 [...]