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 [...]
SHOW OPEN TABLES – what is in your table cache
December 14, 2008 By 3 Comments
One command, which few people realize exists is SHOW OPEN TABLES – it allows you to examine what tables do you have open right now:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> show open tables from test; +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ | Database | Table | In_use | Name_locked | +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ | test | a | 3 | 0 | +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
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 [...]
Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot
June 9, 2008 By 5 Comments
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 [...]
Can MySQL temporary tables be made safe for statement-based replication?
May 26, 2008 By 8 Comments
A while ago I wrote about how to make MySQL replication reliable, part of which is to eliminate temporary tables. The idea is this: if a slave is stopped (or crashed) while a temporary table is open and is then restarted, the temporary table doesn’t exist anymore, and the slave will have problems trying to [...]
Should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL ?
April 6, 2008 By 31 Comments
So you’re running dedicated MySQL Linux box with plenty of memory, so the good question arises if you should have swap file enabled or disable it ? I’ve seen production successfully running on boxes both with and without swap file so it is not the question of you must do it this or that way [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
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 [...]
How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables
August 16, 2007 By 26 Comments
As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]
Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization
December 4, 2006 By 5 Comments
Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average [...]
What to tune in MySQL Server after installation
September 29, 2006 By 118 Comments
My favorite question during Interview for people to work as MySQL DBAs or be involved with MySQL Performance in some way is to ask them what should be tuned in MySQL Server straight after installation, assuming it was installed with default settings. I’m surprised how many people fail to provide any reasonable answer to this [...]
