In many write-intensive workloads Innodb/XtraDB storage engines you may see hidden and dangerous “debt” being accumulated – unpurged transaction “history” which if not kept in check over time will cause serve performance regression or will take all free space and cause an outage. Let’s talk about where it comes from and what can you do to avoid running into the trouble.

Technical Background: InnoDB is an MVCC engine which means it keeps multiple versions of the rows in the database, and when rows are deleted or updated they are not immediately removed from the database but kept for some time – until they can be removed. For a majority of OLTP workloads they can be removed seconds after the change actually took place. In some cases though they might need to be kept for a long period of time – if there are some old transactions running in the system that might still need to look at an old database state. As of …