May 23, 2013

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture

In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]

The story of one MySQL Upgrade

I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]

Debugging problems with row based replication

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 [...]

Looking at Redis

Recently I had a chance to take a look at Redis project, which is semi-persistent in memory database with idea somethat similar to memcache but richer feature set. Redis has simple single process event driven design, which means it does not have to deal with any locks which is performance killer for a lot of [...]

Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine

(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]

Recovery beyond data restore

Quite frequently I see customers looking at recovery as on ability to restore data from backup which can be far from being enough to restore the whole system to operating state, especially for complex systems. Instead of looking just at data restore process you better look at the whole process which is required to bring [...]

How SHOW SLAVE STATUS relates to CHANGE MASTER TO

As you probably know MySQL Replication (statement based) works by fetching statements from MASTERs binary log and executing them on the SLAVE. Since MySQL 4.0 this process is a bit more involved having events passing via relay logs on the Slave which also means there are two replication threads “IO Thread” and “SQL Thread” used [...]

Can MySQL temporary tables be made safe for statement-based replication?

A while ago I wrote about how to make MySQL replication reliable, part of which is to eliminate temporary tables. The idea is this: if a slave is stopped (or crashed) while a temporary table is open and is then restarted, the temporary table doesn’t exist anymore, and the slave will have problems trying to [...]

Filtered MySQL Replication

To get this straight – I’m not a big fan of filtered or partial MySQL Replication (as of version MySQL 5.0) – there is enough gotchas with replication itself and getting things right with filtering can get quite bumpy road. In some applications however it is very helpful so lets see what one should do [...]