The other day a customer asked me to do capacity planning for their web server farm. I was looking at the CPU graph for one of the web servers that had Hyper-threading switched ON and thought to myself: “This must be quite a misleading graph – it shows 30% CPU usage. It can’t really be that this server can handle 3 times more work?”

Or can it?

I decided to do what we usually do in such case – I decided to test it and find out the truth. Turns out – there’s more to it than meets the eye.

How Intel Hyper-Threading works

Before we get to my benchmark results, let’s talk a little bit about hyper-threading. According to Intel, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more …

In the MySQL Team, we are currently evaluating potential changes to the default server configuration for MySQL 5.7. For more context, please see my earlier post here.

One of the specific changes we would like to make is with the following three related replication and InnoDB settings:

Over the past few months I’ve written a couple of posts about dangerous debt of InnoDB Transactional History and about the fact MVCC can be the cause of severe MySQL performance issues. In this post I will cover a related topic – InnoDB Transaction Isolation Modes, their relationship with MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) and how they impact MySQL performance.

The MySQL Manual provides a decent description of transaction isolation modes supported by MySQL – I will not repeat it here but rather focus on performance implications.

SERIALIZABLE – This is the strongest …

The devroom’s schedule is now published on Fosdem’s website.

As you can see, it will be a heavy day full of good content. You can also notice that there won’t be any lunch-time break.

We advise you to then bring your lunch (like a sandwich) with you in the room and eat it between talks or prepare in advance when you will take your break during a talk you don’t want to attend (is it even possible ?).

This blog explains how relay log recovery happens in a scenario where an applier thread (SQL_Thread) is starting for the first time and its starting position is not available for relay log recovery operations. If you are using GTIDs with MASTER_AUTO_POSITION then the following is more or less irrelevant since we then employ a more resilient repositioning scheme. The potential issue described here will also not occur if you have employed crash-safe replication settings, including --sync_master_info=1. With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s proceed.

Background

A crash-safe slave in MySQL …

Our latest eBook, the Ultimate Guide to Building Database Driven Apps with Go, consolidates years of expert advice into one, easy-to-read document. It is the fastest way to learn how to connect to a database from Go programs and use database/sql properly while avoiding many mistakes and ensuring high performance and correct code.

The below table of contents shows the scope of the ebook.

Download the full edition here. Ready, set, Go!

Silly pun, we know. We couldn’t help ourselves.

A while ago I blogged about a potential workaround for MySQL error 1070 that could be used to add a unique constraint with more than 16 columns.

As a reminder here's the error you get when you try to create a unique constraint with more than 16 columns in MySQL:

ERROR 1070 (42000): Too many key parts specified; max 16 parts allowed

The solution I proposed should work, but when I started to implement it I made a couple of changes that merit this follow-up post. One change is fairly generic, and the other is specific to my use case.

The generic change was to only concatenate some of the columns, rather than all of them. Specifically I only need to concatenate N-15 columns. So if I want to have a unique constraint on 20 columns, I can include 15 of those actual columns and then …

MySQL 5.6.22 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here.

For this release, there is 1 “Security Note”, 2 “Functionality Changed”, and 5 “Compilation Notes”, all benign, but let me address them:

1. Security Note: The linked OpenSSL library for the MySQL Commercial Server has been updated from version 1.0.1h to version 1.0.1j. Issues fixed in the new version are described at http://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html.
2. Functionality Changed: Replication: The variable binlogging_impossible_mode has been renamed binlog_error_action. binlogging_impossible_mode is now deprecated. (Bug #19507567)
3. Functionality Changed: …

MariaDB 5.5.41 was recently released (it is the latest MariaDB 5.5), and is available for download here:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/5.5.41/

This is a maintenance release, and so there were not too many changes, *but* please take notice as there are 2 very important bug fixes:

• Bug Fixed: A fix to a serious bug in InnoDB and XtraDB that sometimes could cause a hard lock up of the server (Bug #MDEV-7026)
• Bug Fixed: A fix to unnecessary waits in InnoDB and XtraDB (Bug #MDEV-7100)
• Includes all bugfixes and updates from MySQL 5.5.41 ( …

2014 was a productive year for the MariaDB Foundation.

Here is a list of some of the things MariaDB Foundation employees have
accomplished during 2014:

The 3 full-time MariaDB Foundation developers have worked hard to make MariaDB better:

• Some 260 commits
• Some 25 reviews of code from the MariaDB community.
• Fixed some 170 bugs and new features. For a full list, please check Jira.
• Reported some 160 bugs.

Some of the main new features Foundation developers have worked on in 2014 are:

• Porting and improving MariaDB on IBM Power8.
• Porting Galera to MariaDB 10.1 as a standard feature.
• Query timeouts (MDEV-4427)
• Some coding and reviews of Parallel replication …