Ideas, releases, practical guides, and perspectives from the people building with MySQL.
During any MySQL major version upgrade, especially when moving from 8.0 to 8.4, it’s not just about compatibility checks. Subtle default changes can directly impact MySQL performance tuning, and if…
The post How to fix write latency in MySQL 8.4 Upgrade first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.
MySQL HeatWave Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides built-in telemetry and logging capabilities that help organizations monitor database activity, troubleshoot issues, and maintain operational health. These logs are valuable not only for operations and performance tuning, but also for governance and regulatory compliance, where audit logging can be essential for tracking database activity and […]
Oracle was proud to sponsor and participate in TEDAI San Francisco, a sold-out event that brought together over 1,200 attendees from across industries to explore, debate, and celebrate the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. Through a mix of key panels, a 48-hour hackathon, and thought leadership engagement, Oracle showcased its commitment to responsible AI innovation […]
Introduction
Many MySQL setups begin life with a familiar incantation:
Copy Copied!
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 70% of RAM…and then nothing changes.
That’s not tuning. That’s a starting guess.
Real tuning starts when the workload pushes back.
Visual Overview
The InnoDB buffer pool is where database performance is quietly decided. It determines whether your workload hums along in memory or drags itself across disk. If you’re not actively observing and tuning it, you’re leaving performance on the table.
This guide walks through how to monitor, understand, and tune the buffer pool using real signals instead of guesswork.
What the Buffer Pool Really Is
The buffer pool isn’t just “memory for MySQL.” It’s a living system under constant pressure:
Benchmarking MyRocks vs. InnoDB in Memory-Constrained Environments It is a well-known fact in the database world that InnoDB is incredibly fast when the entire database fits into memory. But what happens when your data grows beyond your available RAM? MyRocks, built on RocksDB, is frequently recommended as a superior choice for environments constrained by memory, […]
Speed up your PHP application without changing a single query.
A few days ago I set out to answer a simple question: how much faster can a PHP app go if you drop a SQL cache in front of MySQL — without touching application code? The answer is below. On a four-table join aggregating revenue by category and region, Readyset served the same result 60x faster than MySQL. And all I did was change a port number.
This post walks through exactly what I did, step by step, so you can reproduce it yourself.
What Is Readyset?
Readyset is a SQL-aware caching engine that speaks the native MySQL wire protocol. Your PHP application connects to it the same way it connects to MySQL — same driver, same queries, same credentials. Underneath, Readyset proxies queries to your upstream database and, for the ones you choose to cache, serves …
[Read more]A practical guide to MySQL failover strategies, comparing automated and manual approaches, and examining risks such as replication lag, split-brain, and incorrect promotion in high availability environments.
Announcing MySQL HeatWave Telemetry data publishing into OCI Log Analytics — the easiest way to view , analyze the MYSQL Heatwave Logs New build-in feature to publish the MySQL Logs to OCI Log Analytics Telemetry Data: The Following data will be published based on the user selection1. Error log: Contains a record of mysqld startup and shutdown […]
It is a classic trap: you spend a week fine-tuning your cache and your database hits only to realize your application is essentially running with the handbrake on. I saw this with my tests: MySQL and Readyset were returning rows in 0.2 ms, but the application throughput remained capped at 40 queries per second (QPS).
The database isn’t the bottleneck, and the cache isn’t the bottleneck. Your application code is simply leaving performance on the table. While running some demos recently, I found that a Node.js service went from 40 QPS to over 6,000 QPS, which is a 150x improvement without changing a single database setting or query plan. Here is a post-mortem of how application-layer bottlenecks can neutralize even the most aggressive infrastructure wins.
The “Fairness” Trap: Event Loop Lag
In Node.js and similar async runtimes we are taught to “be …
[Read more]In my recent series on Scoped Vector Search, we looked at the query patterns that make vector search a first-class citizen in MySQL. While the logic for those searches is now established, the infrastructure supporting them requires constant attention as the MySQL ecosystem moves toward its new release model.
Today, I’m announcing MyVector v1.26.3. This is a foundational release focused on environment compatibility and CI/CD robustness.
What’s in v1.26.3?
This release ensures that MyVector remains stable and buildable across the shifting landscape of MySQL Innovation and LTS releases.