MySQL has a nice feature, slow query log, which allows you to log all queries that exceed a predefined about of time to execute. Peter Zaitsev first wrote about this back in 2006 – there have been a few other posts here on the MySQL Performance Blog since then (check this and this, too) but I wanted to revisit his original subject in today’s post.

Query optimization is essential for good database …

I am very pleased to announce a new event in conjunction with the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this year: Open Source Appreciation Day on Monday, March 31st in the Santa Clara Convention Center! We are pleased to announce two separate groups holding events this year under this new umbrella. We are hosting an event called “OpenStack Today” for those interested in learning more about developments in the OpenStack world. CentOS is holding the “CentOS Dojo Santa Clara” …

TL;DR version: The backup locks feature introduced in Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and can be used to take both physical and logical backups with less downtime on busy servers. To employ the feature with mysqldump, use mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. The next release of Percona XtraBackup will also be using backup locks automatically if the target server supports the feature.

Now on to the gory details, but let’s start with some history.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

mysql> FLUSH TABLES;
# execute myisamchk, myisampack, backup / restore some tables, etc.

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be …

I recently worked on an uncommon slow query: less than 100 rows were read and returned, the whole dataset was fitting in memory but the query took several seconds to run. Long story short: the query was a join involving 21 tables, running on MySQL 5.1. But by default MySQL 5.1 is not good at handling joins with such a large number of tables. The good news is that MySQL 5.6 brings welcome improvements.

Isolating the problem

As always with a slow query, finding the execution plan with EXPLAIN is the 1st step to understand where time is spent. Here the plan was very good with almost all joins using the primary key or a unique key, but perhaps the most interesting part was that EXPLAIN was very slow as well. This indicates that the optimizer takes a lot of time finding the optimal execution plan. To double check, we can run SHOW PROFILE:

mysql> set @@profiling = 1;
mysql> SELECT …

Mats Kindahl of Oracle is lead developer of MySQL Fabric

MySQL Fabric is an integrated framework for managing farms of MySQL servers with support for both high-availability and sharding. Its development has been spearheaded by Mats Kindahl, senior principal software developer in MySQL at Oracle.

Mats is leading the MySQL Scaling and High-Availability effort covering the newly released MySQL Fabric and the MySQL Applier for Hadoop. He is also the architect and implementer of several features (mostly replication features), including the row-based replication available in 5.1 and the binary log group commit available in MySQL 5.6. Before starting MySQL he earned a doctoral degree in the area of automated verification of distributed systems and worked with implementation of C and C++ compilers.

He’ll be presenting at next month’s …

When looking at queries that are candidates for optimization I often recommend that people look at rows_sent and rows_examined values as available in the slow query log (as well as some other places). If rows_examined is by far larger than rows_sent, say 100 larger, then the query is a great candidate for optimization. Optimization could be as simple as adding a few indexes or much more complicated as in generating summary tables so you do not need to rely on large aggregations for your real-time queries.

Just to be clear this is a great rule for your “real time” queries need to be handled very quickly and in high volumes. Batch jobs, reporting queries often will have to scan through millions of rows to get few rows of result set and it is fine.

So it is all clear with rows_sent being smaller than rows_examined but can it be smaller ? Yes it can! Here are couple …

The MySQL client has some functionalities some of us never use. Why would you use them and what is the added value of this?

Every DBA and developer has had a moment when he or she needs to connect to a MySQL database using the command line tool. Therefore I’ve written down an explanation of some command line commands you can insert in the CLI, most of them give added value and make your experience with the cli more enjoyable.

prompt

Who has never witnessed the scary feeling of not being connected to the write database when having several terminals open. I do, due to the fact I use the prompt functionality.

mysql >\R Production >
PROMPT set to 'Production > '

Or you can go a bit further and visualise the user, host and active database in:

mysql > \R \u@\h [\d]>
PROMPT set to '\u@\h [\d]>'
root@testbox [test]>

edit

In some …

In my previous post I pointed out that the existing ARCHIVE storage engine in MySQL may not be the one that will satisfy your needs when it comes to effectively storing large and/or old data. But are there any good alternatives? As the primary purpose of this engine is to store rarely accessed data in disk space efficient way, I will focus here on data compression abilities rather then on performance.

The InnoDB engine provides compressed row format, but is it’s efficiency even close to the one from that available in archive engine? You can also compress MyISAM tables by using myisampack tool, but that also means a table will be read only after such operation.

Moreover, I don’t trust MyISAM nor Archive when it comes to data durability. Fortunately along came a quite new (open source since April …

Next Wednesday, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson and I will co-present a webinar about ClusterControl, a cluster management tool created by Severalnines that can monitor Percona XtraDB Cluster. It provides DBAs with the right metrics to manage and optimize applications during development and production.

In the webinar, titled “Performance Monitoring and Troubleshooting of Percona XtraDB Cluster,” we will discuss ClusterControl in general, and then we will explain how to install ClusterControl 1.2.5 in agentless mode. This is a particularly interesting use-case for me because in this …

A couple of weeks ago, shortly after Vadim wrote about Percona Cloud Tools and using Slow Query Log to capture the data, Mark Leith asked why don’t we just use Performance Schema instead? This is an interesting question and I think it deserves its own blog post to talk about.

First, I would say main reason for using Slow Query Log is compatibility. Basic Slow query log with microsecond query time precision is available starting in MySQL 5.1, while events_statements_summary_by_digest table was only added in MySQL 5.6 which was out for …