May 24, 2013

Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!

For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]

10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL

People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance

Monty Taylor posted interesting investigation of the fact read_buffer_size variable affects connection speed. This is not something you would expect right ? me too. Not only global user data is expected to be cached on startup but even if it is not why would you do full table scan to fetch single user information ? [...]

How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables

As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]

MySQL: Followup on UNION for query optimization, Query profiling

Few days ago I wrote an article about using UNION to implement loose index scan. First I should mention double IN also works same way so you do not have to use the union. So changing query to:

So as you see there are really different types of ranges in MySQL. IN range allows [...]

SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through

Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

Using MyISAM in production

There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]

MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.

MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]

MySQL Server Memory Usage

Every so often people ask me the question how should they estimate memory consumption by MySQL Server in given configuration. What is the formula they could use. The reasons to worry about memory usage are quite understandable. If you configure MySQL Server so it uses too small amount of memory it will likey perform suboptimally. [...]