Some time ago, Peter Zaitsev posted a blog titled “How well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool?” He used some special INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables developed for Percona Server 5.1 to report how much of each InnoDB table and index resides in your buffer pool.

As Peter pointed out, you can use this view into the buffer pool to watch a buffer pool warm up with pages as you run queries. You can also use it for capacity planning. If you expect some tables need to be fully loaded in the buffer pool to be used efficiently, but the buffer pool isn’t large enough to hold them, then it’s time to increase the size of the buffer pool.

The problem, however, was that system tables change from version to version. Specifically, the INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_PAGES_INDEX table no longer exists in Percona Server 5.6, and the …

On July 16 I’ll be presenting my next webinar focusing on common mistakes committed by MySQL users.

How to Avoid Even More of the Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes

“Why can’t I just save my data to a file?”

Using an SQL database seems so complex to get right, and for good reason. The variety of data-driven applications is practically limitless, and as project requirements change, we find ourselves taking shortcuts and adopting bad habits. But there are proven methods to understanding how to develop and manage data in a scalable and reliable way. This talk shows you some of these methods, including:

• How to optimize a database application with partitioning and sharding.
• How to avoid the secret security …

Next Friday, May 31 at 10 a.m. Pacific, I’ll present Percona’s next webinar, “SQL Query Patterns, Optimized.”

Based on my experiences solving tough SQL problems for Percona training and consulting, I’ll classify several common types of queries with which developers struggle. I’ll test several SQL solutions for each type of query objective, and show how you can use MySQL 5.6 built-in methods to analyze them for optimal query efficiency.  The discussion will cover optimizer reports, query profiling, and session status to measure performance.

The query patterns will …

SQL Antipatterns, by Bill Karwin, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010. About 300 pages. Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.

I loved this book. (Disclosure: Bill is a colleague of mine.) This is the first book I’ve read from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and if the rest are like this one, I want to read them. The quality of the writing is way above the average technical book. Techniques that feel gimmicky and forced in other books, such as fake stories to introduce each chapter, actually work here (because they’re real stories, not fake ones). Each topic is named in a memorable way and introduced very …