May 25, 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 [...]

Idea: Couple of more string types

MySQL has a lot of string data types – CHAR, VARCHAR, BLOB, TEXT, ENUM and bunch of variants such as VARBINARY but I think it is not enough I would also like to see type HEXCHAR which would be able to store hex strings, such as those returned as MD5() and SHA1() efficiently. With little [...]

Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB Version 0.1 Released

As Peter mentioned in one of previous posts, we’ve done huge work developing robust strategies of InnoDB data recovery to provide our customers effective data recovery services and one of major parts of these strategies is our toolkit for InnoDB data recovery. Today I’m proud to announce its first public release which was used to [...]

Integers in PHP, running with scissors, and portability

Until recently I thought that currently popular scripting languages, which mostly evolved over last 10 years or something, must allow for easier portability across different platforms compared to ye good olde C/C++. After all, their development started a few decades after C, so its notorious caveats are all well-known and should be easy to avoid [...]

Cache Performance Comparison

Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]

MySQL Prepared Statements

If you care about archiving best performance in your application using MySQL you should learn about prepared statements. These do not neccesary provide performance beneft but they may, they also have other benefits. As a quick introduction – before MySQL 4.1 there were only textual statements and textual protocol for data transfer – query was [...]

To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression

MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]

My Innodb Feature wishes

At Users Conference Heikki did good presentation about Innodb planned features. I did not see some of big and tiny wishes listed so I was making notes. Here is what I’d like to see Packed indexes. In many cases then difference in Performace with MyISAM and Innodb is huge for read only workload it is [...]