Let's say you have a database that stores not only current transactional data, but also historic data that's unchanging. In particular, you have a large table containing hundreds of gigabytes worth of last year's data, and it won't change. Having backed it up already, you don't need to back it up every time. Is there any way to exclude this table from a backup?

For InnoDB tables with innodb-file-per-table enabled (the default as of MySQL 5.6), MySQL Enterprise Backup supports this feature in inverse. Specifically, you can choose to include specific innodb-file-per-table tables in addition to those stored in the system tablespace.

In order to exclude a specific table, you need to provide a regular expression to the --include option that includes every table except the one you want to exclude. For example, in my sakila …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post. Later on in A quick introduction to innodb_ruby I walked through installation and a few quick demos of the innodb_space command-line tool.

The physical structure of InnoDB’s INDEX pages was described in The physical structure of InnoDB index pages, and the logical structure was described in B+Tree …

innodb_flush_method variable specifies how InnoDB opens and flushes log and data files. In Innodb optimization, setting the variable innodb_flush_method tweaks the performance most of the times but there are cases…

The post MySQL variable innodb_flush_method – summarized first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post. Later on in A quick introduction to innodb_ruby I walked through installation and a few quick demos of the innodb_space command-line tool.

The physical structure of InnoDB’s INDEX pages was described in The physical structure of InnoDB index pages. We’ll now look into how InnoDB logically structures its indexes, using some practical examples.

An aside on terminology: B+Tree, …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post. (Note that each image below is linked to a higher resolution version of the same image.)

The basic structure of the space and each page was described in The basics of InnoDB space file layout, and we’ll now take a deeper look into how INDEX pages are physically structured. This will lay the ground work to discuss indexes at a logical (and much higher) level.

Everything is an index in InnoDB

Before diving into physical structures, it’s critical to understand that in InnoDB, …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core I introduced a new library and command-line tool in the innodb_ruby project. Later on in A quick introduction to innodb_ruby I walked through installation and a few quick demos of the innodb_space command-line tool.

In my last post, Page management in InnoDB space files, I described InnoDB’s extent, file segment, and free space management structures. Now I will provide a few demonstrations of using innodb_space to examine those structures in real tables.

(Note that if you have installed innodb_ruby before, you …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post. (Note that each image below is linked to a higher resolution version of the same image.)

The basic structure of the space and each page was described in The basics of InnoDB space file layout, so now we’ll expand on that to describe InnoDB’s structures related to management of pages and extents, and “free space” management, and how it tracks pages allocated to the many different purposes for which pages are used.

Extents and extent descriptors

As described previously, …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post.

InnoDB’s data storage model uses “spaces”, often called “tablespaces” in the context of MySQL, and sometimes called “file spaces” in InnoDB itself. A space may consist of multiple actual files at the operating system level (e.g. ibdata1, ibdata2, etc.) but it is just a single logical file — multiple physical files are just treated as though they were physically concatenated together.

Each space in InnoDB is assigned a 32-bit integer space ID, which is used in many different places to refer to the space. InnoDB always has a “system space”, which is always assigned the …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core I introduced a new library and command-line tool in the innodb_ruby project. Now I’ll show off a few of the things it can do. I won’t try to explain all of the InnoDB structures exposed, since that will get the demos here way off track. We’ll come back to those structures later on!

Installing innodb_ruby

If you’re familiar with Ruby and gems (or you just happen to have a well-configured Ruby installation), I regularly push innodb_ruby gems to RubyGems, so you should only need to:

gem install innodb_ruby

If that doesn’t work, you might want to check out The RubyGems manual to try and get your installation working. …

I’ve been using InnoDB for about a decade now, and up to now have understood it well enough to make it do what I wanted, most of the time. However in order to achieve some goals related to efficiency, I’ve found it necessary to take my understanding to the next level. Unfortunately, the InnoDB documentation was pretty lacking in clear explanations of InnoDB’s internal data structures. Reading the code turned out to be the only way to find the information I needed.

However I quickly found that the structures and their usage (and especially their inter-relationships) are way too complex to keep in your head just based on reading the code. Additionally it’s only really possible to hope you’ve understood the structure correctly just based on reading (and for me, there were a lot of misunderstandings along the way).

An approach I’ve long taken to understanding something that is complex and poorly documented is the …