May 22, 2013

Copying InnoDB tables between servers

The feature I announced some time ago http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/06/08/impossible-possible-moving-innodb-tables-between-servers/ is now available in our latest releases of XtraBackup 0.8.1 and XtraDB-6. Now I am going to show how to use it (the video will be also available on percona.tv). Let’s take tpcc schema and running standard MySQL ® 5.0.83, and assume we want to copy order_line [...]

Just do the math!

One of the most typical reasons for performance and scalability problems I encounter is simply failing to do the math. And these are typically bad one because it often leads to implementing architectures which are not up for job they are intended to solve. Let me start with example to make it clear. Lets say [...]

Talking MySQL to Sphinx

In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]

What does Using filesort mean in MySQL?

If you were interviewing to work at Percona, and I asked you “what does Using filesort mean in EXPLAIN,” what would you say? I have asked this question in a bunch of interviews so far, with smart people, and not one person has gotten it right. So I consider it to be a bad interview [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Sphinx 0.9.8 is released just in time for OSCON 2008

As you probably already seen in a post by Baron, Sphinx Release 0.9.8 is finally out, just in time for OSCON 2008. Even though it is “minor release” if you look at the number, it is major release in practice (and you can view snapshots as minor releases). The changes since 0.9.7 are dramatic with [...]

The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O

In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]

Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?

Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]

Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size

My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]

The new cool MySQL patch has landed! Check your queries performance!

Microslow patch is used by many DBAs and developers to accurately time their queries and to catch those which run less than a second as they can also be a performance killer for a busy application. Recently I have started the development of an updated version of the patch. The basic idea is the same [...]