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 [...]
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot
We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]
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 [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
Making MySQL Replication Parallel
Kevin Burton writes about making MySQL Replication Parallel. Many of us have been beaten by the fact MySQL Replication is single threaded so in reality it is only able to use only single CPU and single disk effectively which is getting worse and worse as computers are getting “wider” these days with multi-core CPUs. Kevin [...]
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 [...]

