Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
November 9, 2010 By 12 Comments
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Instrumentation and the cost of Foreign Keys
September 20, 2010 By 9 Comments
I occasionally get in to light arguments healthy discussions with students about whether or not to use Foreign Key constraints on InnoDB tables. My standard response has always been: “it depends on how much of a tradeoff you are willing to make for performance. In some situations the cost can be considerable”. .. that’s when [...]
How long Innodb Shutdown may take
September 2, 2010 By 9 Comments
How long it may take MySQL with Innodb tables to shut down ? It can be quite a while. In default configuration innodb_fast_shutdown=ON the main job Innodb has to do to complete shutdown is flushing dirty buffers. The number of dirty buffers in the buffer pool varies depending on innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct as well as workload and [...]
Why you can’t rely on a replica for disaster recovery
July 31, 2010 By 25 Comments
A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues and I worked on a data corruption case that reminded me that sometimes people make unsafe assumptions without knowing it. This one involved SAN snapshotting that was unsafe. In a nutshell, the client used SAN block-level replication to maintain a standby/failover MySQL system, and there was [...]
Analyzing the distribution of InnoDB log file writes
July 16, 2010 By 5 Comments
I recently did a quick analysis of the distribution of writes to InnoDB’s log files. On a high-traffic commodity MySQL server running Percona XtraDB for a gaming workload (mostly inserts to the “moves” table), I used strace to gather statistics about how the log file writes are distributed in terms of write size. InnoDB writes [...]
Intro to OLAP
July 12, 2010 By 10 Comments
This is the first of a series of posts about business intelligence tools, particularly OLAP (or online analytical processing) tools using MySQL and other free open source software. OLAP tools are a part of the larger topic of business intelligence, a topic that has not had a lot of coverage on MPB. Because of this, [...]
Recover BLOB fields
July 1, 2010 By 4 Comments
For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]
Purge Thread Spiral of Death
June 10, 2010 By 5 Comments
I just wrote a large post on reasons for innodb main tablespace excessive growth and I thought it would make sense to explain briefly of why it is so frequently you have purge not being the problem at all and when out of no where you can see purge thread being unable to keep up [...]
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
