May 24, 2013

MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache

or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]

Innodb row size limitation

I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances

This post is the second of a series that started here. The first step to build the HA solution is to create two working instances, configure them to be EBS based and create a security group for them. A third instance, the client, will be discussed in part 7. Since this will be a proof [...]

MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3

This is part 3 of our series.  In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database.  The [...]

Innodb performance gotcha w Larger queries.

Couple of days ago I was looking for a way to improve update performance for the application and I was replacing single value UPDATE with multiple value REPLACE (though I also saw the same problem with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE) As I went from 1 value to 3 or 10 in the batch performance [...]

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 [...]

Converting Character Sets

The web is going the way of utf8.  Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8.  Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]

JOIN Performance & Charsets

We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you’ve inherited a schema that you can’t change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries. Take [...]

Picking datatype for STATUS fields

Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]