The next MySQL TechDay is taking place in Paris, 22/May (the next week!!!) - if you're MySQL lover and will be in Paris area this day - hurry up to register on the event page and attend it - trust me, you'll not regret ;-))

We're continuing to follow our TechDay tradition:

• the event is completely free (but places are limited, so you have to be registered to attend)
• the content is pure technical and directly from Oracle engineering, no marketing ;-)
• this is a true full day event, and we're reserving enough time to go in depth for each presented stuff..
• the event is taking place in Oracle office in a pretty wide and comfortable amphitheater, covered by WiFi, so you may twit live about #mysqltechday and remain "connected" if this is a part of your constrains …

Some of us Perconians are at OpenStack summit this week in Atlanta. Matt Griffin, our director of product management, tweeted about the turbo-hipster CI talk about their experience of ALTER TABLEs running faster on Percona Server. Oracle’s Morgan Tocker then tweeted in response, asking why this was the case. I decided that the simplest way to answer that was here in this post.

The reason for this is the …

In InnoDB bugs found during research on InnoDB data storage I mentioned MySQL Bug #67963 which was then titled “InnoDB wastes 62 out of every 16384 pages”. I said:

InnoDB needs to occasionally allocate some internal bookkeeping pages; two for every 256 MiB of data. In order to do so, it allocates an extent (64 pages), allocates the two pages it needed, and then adds the remainder of the extent (62 free pages) to a list of extents to be used for single page allocations called FREE_FRAG. Almost nothing allocates pages from that list, so these pages go to waste.

This is fairly subtle, wasting only 0.37% of disk space in any large InnoDB table, but nonetheless interesting and quite fixable.

Wasting 0.37% of disk space was …

We just released, as an open source release, our new percona-agent (https://github.com/percona/percona-agent), the agent to work with Percona Cloud Tools. This agent is written in Go.

I will give a webinar titled “Monitoring All MySQL Metrics with Percona Cloud Tools” on June 25 that will cover the new features in percona-agent and Percona Cloud Tools, where I will also explain how it works. You are welcome to register now and join me. …

Recently, I was asked about an interesting case in ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization. Consider a table

create table tbl (
  …
  KEY key1(col1, col2),
  PRIMARY KEY (pk)
) engine=InnoDB;

Consider queries like:

  select * from tbl where col1=’foo’ and col2=123 order by pk limit 1;
  select * from tbl where col1=’bar’ and col2=123 order by pk limit 1;

These run nearly instantly. But, if one combines these two queries with col1='foo' and col1='bar' into one query with col1 IN ('foo','bar'):

  select * from tbl where col1 IN (’foo’,'bar’) and col2=123 order by pk limit 1;

then the query is be orders of magnitude slower than both of the queries with col1=const.

The first thing to note when doing investigation is to note that the table uses InnoDB engine, which has …

The combination of max_allowed_packet variable and replication in MySQL is a common source of headaches. In a nutshell, max_allowed_packet is the maximum size of a MySQL network protocol packet that the server can create or read. It has a default value of 1MB (<= 5.6.5) or 4MB (>= 5.6.6) and a maximum size of 1GB. This adds some constraints in our replication environment:

• The master server shouldn’t write events to the binary log larger than max_allowed_packet

• All the slaves in the replication chain should have the same max_allowed_packet as the master server

Sometimes, even following those two basic rules we can have problems.

For example, there are situations (also called bugs) where the master writes more data than the max_allowed_packet …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 13.1 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 13.1 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

MySQL is the proud Training Sponsor of PHPTek. This is a great event and I am speaking on Exploiting New MySQL Features on the morning of the 23rd. See you at training day on the 19th!

And do not forget the Chicago MySQL Users Group meeting on the 21st. Yes, there will be pizza at 6:30 but RSVP so we know how much to order.

Oracle Offices
233 South Wacker Dr.
45th Floor
Chicago, IL

Very happy to see this announcement “MySQL 5.6 now available in Cloud SQL: full text search, geospatial queries and online schema changes.”

Foreign Keys are often a mystery to new DBAs in the MySQL world. Hopefully this blog will clear some of this up.

In this example, we will have a table for employee data and a table for the data on offices. First we need the two tables.
CREATE TABLE employee (
-> e_id INT NOT NULL,
-> name CHAR(20),
-> PRIMARY KEY (e_id)
-> );

CREATE TABLE building (
-> office_nbr INT NOT NULL,
-> description CHAR(20),
-> e_id INT NOT NULL,
-> PRIMARY KEY (office_nbr),
-> FOREIGN KEY (e_id)
-> REFERENCES employee (e_id)
-> ON UPDATE CASCADE
-> ON DELETE CASCADE);


Those who do not use Foreign Keys will not be familiar with the last four lines of the building table. The trick is that there are two e_id columns, one in each table. In the employee table …