In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the facets of InnoDB page compression.

Somebody recently asked me about the best way to handle JSON data compression in MySQL. I took a quick look at InnoDB page compression and wanted to share my findings.

There is also some great material on this topic that was prepared and presented by Yura Sorokin at Percona Live Europe 2017: https://www.percona.com/live/e17/sessions/percona-xtradb-compressed-columns-with-dictionaries-an-alternative-to-innodb-table-compression. Yura also implemented …

Since the purpose of a database system is to store data, there is close relationship with the filesystem. As MySQL consultants, we always look at the filesystems for performance tuning opportunities. The most common choices in term of filesystems are XFS and EXT4, on Linux it is exceptional to encounter another filesystem. Both XFS and EXT4 have pros and cons but their behaviors are well known and they perform well. They perform well but they are not without shortcomings.

Over the years, we have developed a bunch of tools and techniques to overcome these shortcomings. For example, since they don’t allow a consistent view of the filesystem, we wrote tools like Xtrabackup to backup a live MySQL database. Another example is the …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

We’re close to opening up the call for papers for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 and I expect this to happen next week. We also have a committee all lined up and ready to vote on submissions.

In other news, I’ve spent some time preparing for the Korean MySQL Power Group meetup to be held in Seoul this Saturday, 11 November 2017. This is a great opportunity for us to extend our reach in Asia. This meetup gathers together top DBAs from Internet companies that use MySQL and related technologies.

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

I spent all of this week at O’Reilly Velocity EU London. I gave a tutorial, a talk and generally networked with attendees (besides my normal evangelical duties). I’ll write some thoughts on it later (probably in a couple of weeks, as Open Source Summit Europe happens next week – and Percona has a booth there).

This will be a quick, short post.

Releases

A few security releases this past week, with some bug fixes as well:

• …

Percona latest blog poll asks how you currently host applications and databases. Select an option below, or leave a comment to clarify your deployment!

With the increased need for environments that respond more quickly to changing business demands, many enterprises are moving to the cloud and hosted deployments for applications and software in order to offload development and maintenance overhead to a third party. The database is no exception. Businesses are turning to using database as a service (DBaaS) to handle their data needs.

DBaaS provides some obvious benefits:

• Offload physical infrastructure to another vendor. It is the responsibility of whoever is providing the DBaaS service to maintain the physical environment – including hardware, software and best …

In this blog post, I’ll provide some guidance on how to choose the MySQL innodb_log_file_size.

Like many database management systems, MySQL uses logs to achieve data durability (when using the default InnoDB storage engine). This ensures that when a transaction is committed, data is not lost in the event of crash or power loss.

MySQL’s InnoDB storage engine uses a fixed size (circular) Redo log space. The size is controlled by innodb_log_file_size and innodb_log_files_in_group (default 2). You multiply those values and get the Redo log space that available to use. While technically it shouldn’t matter whether you change either the innodb_log_file_size or innodb_log_files_in_group variable to control the Redo space size, most people just work with the innodb_log_file_size and leave innodb_log_files_in_group alone.

Configuring …

Join Percona’s Senior Architect, Matthew Boehm, as he presents What You Need to Get the Most Out of Indexes – Part 2 webinar on Thursday, October 19, 2017, at 11:00 am PDT / 2:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Proper indexing is key to database performance. Finely tune your query writing and database performance with tips from the experts. MySQL offers a few different types of indexes and uses them in a variety of ways.

In this session you’ll learn:

• How to use composite indexes
• Other index usages besides lookup
• How to find …

In this blog, we’ll look at a mystery around setting the open_file_limit variable in MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL.

MySQL Server needs file descriptors to run. It uses them to open new connections, store tables in the cache, create temporary tables to resolve complicated queries and access persistent ones. If mysqld is not able to open new files when needed, it can stop functioning correctly. A common symptom of this issue is error 24: “Too many open files.”

The number of file descriptors

mysqld

 can open simultaneously is defined by the configuration

open_files_limit

 option. You would expect it to work like any other MySQL Server option: set in the configuration file, …

In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the MySQL and MariaDB default configuration differences, focusing on MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.2. Percona Server for MySQL uses the same defaults as MySQL, so I will not list them separately.

MariaDB Server is a general purpose open source database, created by the founders of MySQL. MariaDB Server (referred to as MariaDB for brevity) has similar roots as Percona Server for MySQL, but is quickly diverging from MySQL compatibility and growing on its own. MariaDB has become the default installation for several operating systems (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Fedora). Changes in the default variables can make a large difference in the out-of-box …

In my previous blog post, I talked about new general tablespaces in MySQL 8.0. Recently MySQL 8.0.3-rc was released, which includes a new data dictionary. My goal is to create one million tables in MySQL and test the performance.

Background questions

Q: Why million tables in MySQL? Is it even realistic? How does this happen?

Usually, millions of tables in MySQL is a result of “a schema per customer” Software as a Service (SaaS) approach. For the purposes of customer data isolation (security) and logical data partitioning (performance), each “customer” has a dedicated schema. You can think of a WordPress hosting service (or any CMS based hosting) where each …