As you might know even if you’re only using Innodb tables your replication is not completely crash safe – if Slave MySQL Server crashes/power goes down it is likely for relay logs to run out of sync (they are not synced to the disk) plus position on the master which slave remembers becomes stale. During [...]
PHP vs. BIGINT vs. float conversion caveat
Sometimes you need to work with big numbers in PHP (gulp). For example, sometimes 32-bit identifiers are not enough and you have to use BIGINT 64-bit ids; e.g. if you are encoding additional information like the server ID into high bits of the ID. I had already written about the mess that 64-bit integers are [...]
10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL
People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]
Making bugs public – good job MySQL
If you have been MySQL User for many years you might remember the times when MySQL had “zero bugs policy”, this is when all known bugs really were fixed before release was made. To be honest at that time bugs were reported via bugs mailing list not via bugs database as they are now so [...]
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 [...]
MySQL Quality of old and new features
Recent couple of days our team was pointed to number of bugs in MySQL 5.0 which again seriously shakes the confidence in both MySQL Quality Control and bug fix promptness. Let me just take couple of bugs as examples: Triggers broken with auto-increment columns for Innodb tables (bug 26316). As you can see this bug [...]
Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance
Monty Taylor posted interesting investigation of the fact read_buffer_size variable affects connection speed. This is not something you would expect right ? me too. Not only global user data is expected to be cached on startup but even if it is not why would you do full table scan to fetch single user information ? [...]
How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables
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 [...]
MySQL VIEW as performance troublemaker
I start to see applications being built utilizing VIEWs functionality which appeared in MySQL 5.0 and quite frequently VIEWs are used to help in writing the queries – to keep queries simple without really thinking how it affects server performance. Even worse than that – looking at the short table which just gets single row [...]
Query_cache and column level privileges
Recently we were puzzled by question how query_cache works with column level privileges. The question was appeared as we discovered function query_cache_send_result_to_client is called before real parsing of query, so at the moment of execution the query_cache is not able to know which columns are accessed. Looking into source code I found out that in [...]

