In this blog, we’ll look at ClickHouse on its one year anniversary.

It’s been a year already since the Yandex team released ClickHouse as open source software. I’ve had an interest in this project from the very start, as I didn’t think there was an open source analytical database that could compete with industry leaders like Vertica (for example).

This was an exciting year for ClickHouse early adopters. Let’s look at what it accomplished so far.

ClickHouse initially generated interest due to the Yandex name – the most popular search engine in Russia. It wasn’t long before jaw-dropping responses popped up: guys, this thing is crazy fast! Many early adopters who tried ClickHouse were really impressed.

Fast doesn’t mean convenient …

In this blog, we’ll look at the differences in how a PREPARE statement handles errors in binary and text protocols.

Introduction

Since Percona XtraDB Cluster is a multi-master solution, when an application executes conflicting workloads one of the workloads gets rolled back with a DEADLOCK error. While the same holds true even if you fire the workload through a PREPARE statement, there are differences between using the MySQL connector API (with binary protocol) and the MySQL client (with text protocol). Let’s look at these differences with the help of an example.

Base Workload

• Say we have a two-node cluster (n1 and n2) with the following base schema and tables:
  

  use test;
  create table t (i int, k int, primary key pk(i)) engine=innodb;
  insert into t values (1, 10), (2, 20), (3, 30); …

Join Percona’s Senior Operations Engineer, Daniel Kowalewski as he presents Deploying MySQL in Production on Thursday, June 22, 2017 at 11:00 am PDT / 2:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now  MySQL is famous for being something you can install and get going in less than five minutes in terms of development. But normally you want to run MySQL in production, and at scale. This requires some planning and knowledge. So why not learn the best practices around installation, configuration, deployment and backup?

This webinar is a soup-to-nuts talk that will have you going from zero to hero in no time. It includes discussion …

In this post we’ll review how MySQL triggers can affect queries.

Contrary to what the documentation states, we can activate triggers even while operating on views:

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/triggers.html

Important: MySQL triggers activate only for changes made to tables by SQL statements. They do not activate for changes in views, nor by changes to tables made by APIs that do not transmit SQL statements to the MySQL server.

Be on the lookout if you use and depend on triggers, since it’s not the case for updatable views! We have reported a documentation bug for this but figured it wouldn’t hurt to mention this as a short blog post, too. The link to the bug in question is here:

In this blog, we’ll look at ICP counters in the information_schema.INNODB_METRICS. This is part two of the Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) counters blog post series. 

As mentioned in the previous post, in this blog we will look at how to check on ICP counters on MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL. This also applies to MariaDB, since the INNODB_METRICS table is also available for MariaDB (as opposed to the Handler_icp_% counters being MariaDB-specific). We will use the same table and data set as in the previous post.

For simplicity we’ll show the examples on MySQL 5.7.18, but they …

In this post we’ll see how MariaDB’s Handler_icp_% counters status counters (Handler_icp_attempts and Handler_icp_matches) measure ICP-related work done by the server and storage engine layers, and how to see if our queries are getting any gains by using them.

These counters (as seen in SHOW STATUS output) are MariaDB-specific. In a later post, we will see how we can get this information in MySQL and Percona Server. This investigation spun off from comments in Michael’s post about the new MariaDB dashboard in PMM. Comments are very useful, so keep them coming!

We can start by checking the corresponding documentation pages:

…

In this blog post, I’ll review how a hung MySQL transaction can cause the InnoDB history length to grow and negatively affect MySQL performance.

Recently I was helping a customer discover why SELECT queries were running slower and slower until the server restarts (which got things back to normal). It took some time to get from that symptom to a final diagnosis. Please follow me on the journey of chasing this strange MySQL behavior!

Symptoms

Changes in the query response time can mean tons of things. We can check everything from the query plan to the disk performance. However, fixing it with a restart is less common. After looking at “show engine innodb status”, I noticed some strange lines:

Trx read view will not see trx with id >= 41271309593, sees < 41268384363
---TRANSACTION 41271309586, ACTIVE 766132 sec
2 lock struct(s), heap size 376, 0 row lock(s), undo log entries 1 …

A lot of things have been said about UUID, and storing UUID in an optimized way. Now that we have generated columns, we can store the decomposed information inside the UUID and merge it again with generated columns. This blog post demonstrates this process.

First, I used a simple table with one char field that I called uuid_char to establish a base case. I used this table with and without a primary key:

CREATE TABLE uuid_char (
uuid char(36) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
CREATE TABLE uuid_char_pk (
uuid char(36) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (uuid)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

I performed the tests on a local VM over MySQL 5.7.17 for 30 seconds, with only two …

Welcome to the second day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017, and the second set of Percona Live keynotes! It’s a bit rainy outside today, but that isn’t bothering the Percona Live attendees (we’re all indoors learning about new open source technologies)!

Day two of the conference kicked off with another four keynote talks, all of which discussed issues and technologies that are addressed by open source solutions:

The Open Source Database Business Model is Under Siege

Paul Dix (InfluxData)

Paul Dix’s keynote may have ruffled a few feathers, as he looked at possible futures for the open …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to achieve better-than-linear scaling.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. For example, we consider a system scalable if it is capable of increasing its total output under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability.

It is often accepted as a fact that systems (in particular databases) can’t scale better than linearly. By this I mean when you double resources, the expected performance doubles, at best (and often is less than doubled).  

We can attribute this assumption to Amdahl’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), and later …