MySQL has information_schema.tables that contain information such as “data_length” or “avg_row_length.” Documentation on this table however is quite poor, making an assumption that those fields are self explanatory – they are not when it comes to tables that employ compression. And this is where inconsistency is born. Lets take a look at the same table containing some highly compressible data using different storage engines that support MySQL compression:

TokuDB:

mysql> select * from information_schema.tables where table_schema='test' G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
TABLE_CATALOG: def
TABLE_SCHEMA: test
TABLE_NAME: comp
TABLE_TYPE: BASE TABLE
ENGINE: TokuDB
VERSION: 10
ROW_FORMAT: tokudb_zlib
TABLE_ROWS: 40960
AVG_ROW_LENGTH: 10003
DATA_LENGTH: 409722880
MAX_DATA_LENGTH: …

We are using Percona Server + TokuDB engine extensively in Percona Cloud Tools and getting real usage operational experience with this engine. So I want to share some findings we came across, in hope it may help someone in their work with TokuDB.

So, one problem I faced is that SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES is quite slow when I have thousands tables in TokuDB. How slow? For example…

select * from information_schema.tables limit 1000;
...
1000 rows in set (18 min 31.93 sec)

This is very similar to what InnoDB faced a couple years back. InnoDB solved it by adding variable …