May 23, 2013

Rotating MySQL slow logs safely

April 18, 2013 By 7 Comments

This blog post is part two of two. Like part one, published Wednesday, this is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog. Thanks again to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon. And one more reminder that I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there. You [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5

February 1, 2013 By 9 Comments

While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not [...]

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Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

January 15, 2013 By 9 Comments

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 [...]

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Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

October 27, 2012 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Eventual Consistency in MySQL

November 18, 2011 By 8 Comments

We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned.  But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2 MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high.  But [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list

January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments

I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Debugging problems with row based replication

May 6, 2010 By 12 Comments

MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*;   The binlog_format  variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]

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How innodb_open_files affects performance

November 18, 2009 By 4 Comments

Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]

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table_cache negative scalability

November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments

Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]

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