The latest from the MySQL community

MySQL’s innodb_file_per_table is a wonderful thing – most of the time. Having every table use its own .ibd file allows you to easily reclaim space when dropping or truncating tables. But in some use cases, it may cause significant performance issues.

Many of you in the audience are responsible for running automated tests on your codebase before deploying to production. If you are, then one of your goals is having tests run as quickly as possible so you can run them as frequently as possible. Often times you can change specific settings in your test environment that don’t affect the outcome of the test, but do improve throughput. This post discusses how innodb_file_per_table is one of those settings.

I recently spoke with a customer whose use case involved creating hundreds of tables on up to 16 schemas …

Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) are one of my favorite features of MySQL 5.6. The main limitation is that you must stop all the servers at the same time to allow GTID-replication. Not everyone can afford to take a downtime so this requirement has been a showstopper for many people. Starting with Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 enabling GTID replication can be done without almost no downtime. Let’s see how to do it.

Implementation of the Facebook patch

Finding a solution to migrate to GTIDs with no downtime is not a new idea, and several companies have already developed their own patch. The 2 best known implementations are the one from Facebook and the one from …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 on February 6, 2015. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.22, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. Percona Server is open-source and free – and …

Cloud security company Qualys announced Tuesday the issues prevalent in glibc since version 2.2 introduced in 2000-11-10 (the complete Qualys announcement may be viewed here). The vulnerability, CVE-2015-0235, has been dubbed “GHOST.”

As the announcement from Qualys indicates, it is believed that MySQL and by extension Percona Server are not affected by this issue.

Percona is in the process of conducting our own review into the issue related to the Percona Server source code – more information will be released as soon as it is available.

In the interim the current advisory is to update your glibc packages for your distributions if they are in fact vulnerable. The C code from the Qualys announcement may aid in your diagnostics, section 4 of …

A few days ago I wrote about MySQL performance implications of InnoDB isolation modes and I touched briefly upon the bizarre performance regression I found with InnoDB handling a large amount of versions for a single row. Today I wanted to look a bit deeper into the problem, which I also filed as a bug.

First I validated in which conditions the problem happens. It seems to happen only in REPEATABLE-READ isolation mode and only in case there is some hot rows which get many row versions during a benchmark run. For example the problem does NOT happen if I run sysbench with “uniform” distribution.

In terms of concurrent selects it also seems to require some very special conditions – you need to have the connection to let some …

Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …

Query caching is one of the prominent features in MySQL and a vital part of query optimization. It is important to know how it works as it has the potential to cause significant performance improvements – or a slowdown – of your workload.

The MySQL query cache is a global one shared among the sessions. It caches the select query along with the result set, which enables the identical selects to execute faster as the data fetches from the in memory. It is important to have everything identical, no new comments, spaces, or most significantly differences in the WHERE clause. Basically when you trigger a select query, if it is available in the cache; it fetches from there or it considers the query as a new one and will go to the parser.

Even though it has some nice advantages, the MySQL query cache has its own downsides too. Well, let’s think about this: If you are frequently updating the table, you are then invalidating …

If you’ve been studying complex systems you know what minor changes might cause consequences of much greater proportions, sometimes causing some effects that are not easily explained at first. I recently ran across a great illustration of such behavior while doing MySQL benchmarks which I thought would be interesting to share.

I’m using a very simple benchmark – Sysbench 0.5 on Percona Server 5.6.21-70.1 just running update queries:

sysbench  --num-threads=64 --report-interval=10 --max-time=0 --max-requests=0 --rand-type=pareto --oltp-table-size=1000000000 --mysql-user=root --mysql-password= --mysql-db=sbinnodb  --test=/usr/share/doc/sysbench/tests/db/update_index.lua run

Some people frown upon such benchmarks due to their triviality and being irrelevant to workloads. I like them because they often allow you to study already complex system behavior in a much more controlled environment than “real” workloads – and so …

Some time ago, Peter Zaitsev posted a blog titled “How well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool?” He used some special INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables developed for Percona Server 5.1 to report how much of each InnoDB table and index resides in your buffer pool.

As Peter pointed out, you can use this view into the buffer pool to watch a buffer pool warm up with pages as you run queries. You can also use it for capacity planning. If you expect some tables need to be fully loaded in the buffer pool to be used efficiently, but the buffer pool isn’t large enough to hold them, then it’s time to increase the size of the buffer pool.

The problem, however, was that system tables change from version to version. Specifically, the INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_PAGES_INDEX table no longer exists in Percona Server 5.6, and the …

Background on Backup Locks

I was very excited to see Backup locks support in release notes for the latest Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.21 release. For those who are not aware, backup locks offer an alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL) in Xtrabackup. While Xtrabackup can hot-copy Innodb, everything else in MySQL must be locked (usually briefly) to get a consistent snapshot that lines up with Innodb. This includes all other storage engines, but also things like table schemas (even on Innodb) and async replication binary logs. You can skip this lock, but it isn’t …