May 18, 2013

Undo area size restriction needed for Innodb

As you can read from my Innodb Architecture and Performance Optimization presentation Innodb automatically manages undo area in system tablespace so you never need to care about it. I present it as positive feature reducing administration effort needed but it also can cause a troubles as it happened for me today: InnoDB: 11 transaction(s) which [...]

Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables

I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]

Using LVM for MySQL Backup and Replication Setup

If someone asks me about MySQL Backup advice my first question would be if they have LVM installed or have some systems with similar features set for other operation systems. Veritas File System can do it for Solaris. Most SAN systems would work as well. What is really needed is ability to create atomic snapshot [...]

Innodb Double Write

One of very interesting techniques Innodb uses is technique called “doublewrite” It means Innodb will write data twice when it performs table space writes – writes to log files are done only once. So why doublewrite is needed ? It is needed to archive data safety in case of partial page writes. Innodb does not [...]

Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size

If you’re doing significant amount of writes to Innodb tables decent size of innodb_log_file_size is important for MySQL Performance. However setting it too large will increase recovery time, so in case of MySQL crash or power failure it may take long time before MySQL Server is operational again. So how to find the optimal combination [...]

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 [...]

Jeremy Cole on MySQL Replication

Jeremy Cole recently posted very nice post about MySQL Replication Performance. There are however few points I should comment on. Jeremy Speaks about MyISAM and Innodb in the same terms, in fact they are quite different for Replication. As you probably know MyISAM uses buffered IO so if master crashes you’re out of sync anyway [...]

MySQL Server Memory Usage

Every so often people ask me the question how should they estimate memory consumption by MySQL Server in given configuration. What is the formula they could use. The reasons to worry about memory usage are quite understandable. If you configure MySQL Server so it uses too small amount of memory it will likey perform suboptimally. [...]