It has been a while since I have looked at InnoDB crash recovery. A lot has change in the last few years – we have serious crash recovery performance improvements in MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, we have solid state drives raising as typical high performance IO subsystem and we also have the ability to set much larger log files and often have a much larger InnoDB Buffer Pool to work with.

First let me revisit the challenge with have with InnoDB configuration. For write-intensive workloads it is extremely important to size innodb_log_file_size for good performance, however the longer log file size you have the longer you might have to wait for InnoDB to complete crash recovery, which impacts your recovery strategy.

How much can innodb_log_file_size impact performance? Massively! Doing intensive writes to a database that well fits in memory, I’d say there’s a 10x …

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 …

I believe InnoDB storage engine architecture is great for a lot of online workloads, however, there are no silver bullets in technology and all design choices have their trade offs. In this blog post I’m going to talk about one important InnoDB limitation that you should consider.

InnoDB is a multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) storage engine which means many versions of the single row can exist at the same time. In fact there can be a huge amount of such row versions. Depending on the isolation mode you have chosen, InnoDB might have to keep all row versions going back to the earliest active read view, but at the very least it will have to keep all versions going back to the start of SELECT query which is currently running.

In most cases this is not a big deal – if you have many short transactions happening you will have only a few row versions to deal with. If you just use the system for reporting queries but do not …

In MySQL 5.6 we introduced a huge improvement in the way that index and table statistics are gathered by InnoDB and subsequently used by the Optimizer during query optimization: Persistent Statistics. Some aspects of the way that Persistent Statistics work could be improved further though, and we’d really like your input on that.

How much to sample?

The statistics are gathered by picking some pages semi-randomly, analyzing them, and deriving some conclusions about the entire table and/or index from those analyzed pages. The number of pages sampled can be specified on a per-table basis with the STATS_SAMPLE_PAGES clause. For example:

ALTER TABLE t STATS_SAMPLE_PAGES=500;

This way …

The MySQL/MariaDB optimiser likes to know things like the cardinality of an index – that is, the number of distinct values the index holds. For a PRIMARY KEY, which only has unique values, the number is the same as the number of rows.  For an indexed column that is boolean (such as yes/no) the cardinality would be 2.

There’s more to it than that, but the point is that the optimiser needs some statistics from indexes in order to try and make somewhat sane decisions about which index to use for a particular query. The statistics also need to be updated when a significant number of rows have been added, deleted, or modified.

In MyISAM, ANALYZE TABLE does a tablescan where everything is tallied, and the index stats are updated. InnoDB, on the other hand, has always done “index dives”, looking at a small sample and deriving from that. That can be ok as a methodology, but unfortunately the history is awkward. The …

Starting with MySQL 5.6 there is an INNODB_METRICS table available in INFORMATION_SCHEMA which contains some additional information than provided in the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS output – yet might be more lightweight than PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.

Too bad INNODB_METRICS was designed during the Oracle-Sun split under MySQL leadership and so it covers only InnoDB counters. I think this would be a great replacement to all counters that are currently provided though SHOW STATUS – it captures more information such as providing MIN/MAX counts for variables as well as providing the type of the counter (whenever it is current or commutative) as well as human readable comment – describing what such counter means.

The examples of data you can get only from the INNODB_METRICS table includes information about InnoDB Page Splits and merging (which can …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …

In C (and C++) you can specify that a variable should take a specific number of bits of storage by doing “uint32_t foo:4;” rather than just “uint32_t foo”. In this example, the former uses 4 bits while the latter uses 32bits. This can be useful to pack many bit fields together.

Or, that’s what they’d like you to think.

In reality, the C spec allows the compiler to do just about anything it wants with these bitfields – which usually means it’s something you didn’t expect.

For a start, in a struct -e.g. “struct foo { uint32_t foo:4; uint32_t blah; uint32_t blergh:20; }” the compiler could go and combine foo and blergh into a single uint32_t and place it somewhere… or it could not. In this case, sizeof(struct foo) isn’t defined and may vary based on compiler, platform, compiler version, phases of the moon or if you’ve washed your hands recently.

Where …

As described in the MySQL 5.7 manual here, we can now resize the buffer pool without restarting the mysqld process starting with MySQL 5.7.5.

You can now use the "SET GLOBAL innodb_buffer_pool_size = xxxx" command which causes a resizing job to begin in background. We can monitor the progress and state of the resizing work using the …

A deadlock in MySQL happens when two or more transactions mutually hold and request for locks, creating a cycle of dependencies. In a transaction system, deadlocks are a fact of life and not completely avoidable. InnoDB automatically detects transaction deadlocks, rollbacks a transaction immediately and returns an error. It uses a metric to pick the easiest transaction to rollback. Though an occasional deadlock is not something to worry about, frequent occurrences call for attention.

Before MySQL 5.6, only the latest deadlock can be reviewed using SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS command. But with Percona Toolkit’s pt-deadlock-logger you can have deadlock information retrieved from SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS at a given interval and saved to a file or table for late diagnosis. For more information on using pt-deadlock-logger, see …