This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things [...]
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 [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER 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.
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
PROCEDURE ANALYSE
Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space [...]
Testing InnoDB “Barracuda” format with compression
New features of InnoDB – compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 | CREATE TABLE `article87` ( `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL, `ext_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `site_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `forum_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `thread_id` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL, `published` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `crawled` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `num_links` smallint(6) NOT NULL, `links_in` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `cache_author` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `cache_site` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `anchor` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `isthread` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `author_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `inserted` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, `fromfile` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `language_id` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `encoding` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `warning` mediumtext NOT NULL, `is_thread_start` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `source` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL, `hash` char(32) NOT NULL, `mod_is` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `is_adult` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `bodyuc` mediumtext NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `ext_key` (`ext_key`), KEY `forum_id` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`published`), KEY `site_id` (`site_id`,`published`), KEY `hash` (`hash`), KEY `forum_id_2` (`forum_id`,`is_thread_start`,`published`), KEY `published` (`published`), KEY `inserted` (`inserted`), KEY `forum_id_3` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`is_thread_start`), KEY `site_id_2` (`site_id`,`author_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; |
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 [...]
How much memory Innodb locks really take ?
After playing yesterday a bit with INSERT … SELECT I decided to check is Innodb locks are relly as efficient in terms of low resource usage as they are advertised. Lets start with a bit of background – in Innodb row level locks are implemented by having special lock table, located in the buffer pool [...]

