May 22, 2013

Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB

After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]

How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary

To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif

There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3 on January 8th, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.28, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

How to STOP SLAVE on Amazon RDS read replica

We are doing a migration from Amazon RDS to EC2 with a customer. This, unfortunately, involves some downtime – if you are an RDS user, you probably know you can’t replicate an RDS instance to an external server (or even EC2). While it is annoying, this post isn’t going to be a rant on how [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Concatenating MyISAM files

Recently, I found myself involved in the migration of a large read-only InnoDB database to MyISAM (eventually packed). The only issue was that for one of the table, we were talking of 5 TB of data, 23B rows. Not small… I calculated that with something like insert into MyISAM_table… select * from Innodb_table… would take [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

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 [...]