The other day we were doing some peer review on a schema change at VividCortex and the topic of character set, column length, and the potential downsides of using utf8 came up. I knew from experience that there are some hidden gotchas with this, and usually I’ll just say a couple words and send a link with further reading. But Google turned up nothing, so I am writing this post to try to help fix that.

TL;DR version is that when MySQL can’t use an index for operations such as ORDER BY, it may allocate fixed-length memory buffers large enough to hold the worst-case values, and the same might apply to temporary tables on disk. This can be seen in EXPLAIN as “Using filesort; using temporary” and similar. And when this happens, you might end up making MySQL do gigabytes worth of work to finish a query on a table that’s only a fraction of that size.

Let’s see why this can happen.

The Theory of UTF8

In …

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[…] I am connecting following Andrews advice: Stackoverflow Link Also, Monitoring and Managing […]

This Log Buffer Edition makes it way through the realms of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL and brings you some of the blog posts.

Oracle:

Introducing Oracle Big Data Discovery Part 3: Data Exploration and Visualization

FULL and NO_INDEX Hints

Base64 Encode / Decode with Python (or WebLogic Scripting Tool) by Frank Munz

Why I’m Excited About Oracle Integration Cloud Service – New Video

Reminder: …

For years, MySQL replication used to be based on binary log events - all a slave knew was the exact event and the exact position it just read from the master. Any single transaction from a master may have ended in different binary logs, and in different positions in these logs. It was a simple solution that came with limitations - more complex topology changes could require an admin to stop replication on the hosts involved. Or these changes could cause some other issues, e.g., a slave couldn’t be moved down the replication chain without time-consuming rebuild process (we couldn’t easily change replication from A -> B -> C to A -> C -> B without stopping replication on both B and C). We’ve all had to work around these limitations while dreaming about a global transaction identifier.

GTID was introduced along with MySQL 5.6, and brought along some major changes in the way MySQL operates. First of all, every transaction has …

DBAs often encounter situations where they need to kill queries to ensure there are no long-running queries on a MySQL server that would impact performance. Long-running queries can be the result of many factors. Fortunately, Percona Server contains some handy tools to remove problematic MySQL processes. I will highlight all of the tools via some examples in this post.

pt-kill:
There have been some good posts on this blog about the pt-kill tool, like this one by Arunjith Aravindan titled “How a set of queries can be killed in MySQL using Percona Toolkit’s pt-kill.” Let’s dive into pt-kill a bit further with a few more …

This past weekend we had the pleasure of attending Scale13X in Los Angeles. It was full of great conversations with solid people, and it was nice to escape the winter cold for a couple days.

Baron Schwartz presented on VivdCortex’s approach to building a time-series database in MySQL. The talk is titled Scaling VividCortex’s Big Data Systems on MySQL, and the recording and video can be seen here. If you are not automaticaly directed, Baron’s presentation begins at 5:49:00.

Below are the slides and a brief description to pique your interest.

In this talk, Baron Schwartz discusses VividCortex’s unique time-series data requirements and implementation, including:

• How we built a solution using MySQL and additional components such as Redis …

Podcasts Learning

In this episode, we discuss resources available for learning more about MySQL and its forks.

Podcasts Learning

In this episode, we discuss resources available for learning more about MySQL and its forks.

The General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4 has just been announced by Oracle.

The MySQL team at Oracle are excited to announce the General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4, ready for production workloads.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 can be downloaded from mysql.com and the release notes viewed in the MySQL docs.

Figure 1 provides a summary of the enhancements delivered in this release:

• Performance
  • 200M NoSQL Reads/Sec
  • 2.5M SQL Ops/Sec
  • 50% …