First I want to thank everyone who attended my December 19, 2019 webinar “Top 3 Features of MySQL“. Recording and slides are available on the webinar page.

Here are answers to the questions from participants which I was not able to provide during the webinar.

Q: When do undo logs and redo logs come into play? Can you please explain the background operations of these logs?

A: These two are completely different structures.

Undo Logs

Belong to a single active transaction. It contains information on how to undo the latest change to the clustered index, performed by this transaction.

Let’s demonstrate how they work with an example.

Consider this table:

In the previous blog post of this series, MySQL Encryption: Talking About Keyrings, I described how keyrings work. In this post, I will talk about how master key encryption works and what the pros and cons are of using envelope encryption such as a master key.

The idea behind envelope encryption is that you use one key to encrypt multiple other keys. In InnoDB, this “one key” is the master encryption key and the “multiple other keys” are the tablespace keys. Those tablespace keys are the ones that are actually used to encrypt tablespaces. Graphically it can be presented like this:

The master key resides in the keyring, while encrypted tablespace keys reside in tablespace headers (written on page 0 of a tablespace). In the picture above:

Table A is encrypted with key 1. Key 1 is encrypted …

In my previous blog, I have explained how the MySQL clone plugin works internally. In this blog, I am going to do a comparison of  Backup and Recovery speed of MySQL clone plugin with other available mysql open source backup tools.

Below tools are used for speed comparison of Backup and Recovery,

1. Clone-Plugin
2. Xtrabackup
3. mysqldump
4. mydumper with myloader
5. mysqlpump

Test …

InnoDB Page Compression Explained 

We have several customers with multi-terabyte database infrastructure on SSDs, The SSDs are great investment for performance but they are also expensive with shorter lifespans so storage efficiency management is something we are very cautious about on SSDs, At MinervaDB Labs we spend considerable amount of time doing research on InnoDB page compressions benefits and most common mistakes. The compressed tables were first introduced in 2008  with InnoDB plugin for MySQL 5.1 . Facebook has been a major committer to this project and most of it were later implemented in upstream MySQL code as well. We can implement compression in InnoDB is two ways, Either by using Barracuda InnoDB file format or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED

How InnoDB page compression works ?

When a page is …

Loading any large file into MySQL server using the LOAD DATA INFILE is a time consuming process , because it is single threaded and it is a single transaction too. But with modern hardwares system resource is not a bottle neck. At Mydbops we focus on improving the efficiency of process as we value performance more. MySQL introduced the parallel load data operations in its latest minor release MySQL 8.0.17 . I had the curiosity to test this feature and wanted to know, how it can improve the data loading comparing to the existing single threaded method  . Through this blog I am going to  compare the both methods .

Remember you can use the parallel data loading utility only via MySQL Shell .

Internal Work Flow :

This section describes the …

MySQL 8 has recently released clone plugin which makes DBA’s task of rebuilding the DB servers more easy.

• Cloning is a process of creating an exact copy of the original. In technical terms cloning alias to (Backup + Recovery), MySQL database cloning requires a sequence of actions to be performed manually or in a scripted fashion with and without the tools involved.
• Cloning is the first step when you want to configure the replication slave or Joining a new server to the InnoDB cluster. There was no native support for auto provisioning earlier. Percona XtraDB Cluster (MySQL + Galera Cluster) does cloning using xtrabackup tool by default when a new node joins the cluster.
• Now MySQL simplified this task, In this post, We will see how to clone the database using clone plugin and its internals.

                                   Recently, One of our client reached our Remote DBA team with a requirement to reduce the size of the table as it is having many text columns with huge number of records. At preliminary check , I have validated the table size and its row format, as it was  in compressed  format already. 

Later I checked on other possibilities to compress the text columns further, At that time, then I came across per-column compression feature in Percona MySQL server (From 5.7.17-11) which features individual column compression and we were using …

MySQL has had an interesting optimization for years now1, which has popped up from time to time: in certain circumstances, it may choose to use an index that is index-wise less efficient, but provides the resulting rows in order, to avoid a filesort of the result.

What does this typically look like in production? A query that seems simple and easy takes much longer than it should, sometimes. (Perhaps in production, the query gets killed by pt-kill or exceeds the max_execution_time provided.) The query could be very simple indeed:

SELECT ... WHERE `other_id` = 555 ORDER BY `id` ASC LIMIT 1

There’s an index on other_id, and running the query with an appropriate USE INDEX, the query is fast. Even weirder, changing the query to use LIMIT 10 causes it to …

In the last few years there have been several examples of major service problems affecting businesses data: outages causing data inconsistencies; unavailability or data loss, and worldwide cyberattacks encrypting your files and asking for a ransom.

Database-related incidents are a very common industry issue- even if the root cause is not the database system itself. No matter if your main relational system is MySQL, MariaDB, PostgresQL or AWS Aurora -there will be a time where you will need to make use of backups to recover to a previous state. And when that happens it will be the worst time to realize that your backup system hadn’t been working for months, or testing for the first time a cluster-wide recovery.

Forget about the backups, it is all about recovery!

Let me be 100% clear: the question is not IF data …

Hope everyone aware about known about LVM(Logical Volume Manager) an extremely useful tool for handling the storage at various levels. LVM basically functions by layering abstractions on top of physical storage devices as mentioned below in the illustration.

Below is a simple diagrammatic expression of LVM

         sda1  sdb1   (PV:s on partitions or whole disks)
           \    /
            \  /
          Vgmysql      (VG)
           / | \
         /   |   \
      data  log  tmp  (LV:s)
       |     |    |
      xfs  ext4  xfs  (filesystems)

IOPS is an extremely important resource, when it comes to storage it defines the performance of disk. Let’s not forget PIOPS(Provisioned IOPS) one of the major selling points for AWS and other cloud vendors for production machines such …