When trying to understand queries in the slow log, an interesting metric to look at is rows examined.  Also, when trying to understand CPU spikes on a MySQL instance, the InnoDB Metric dml_reads and the global status Innodb_rows_read are interesting to check.  In a similar way, when trying to gather information about which queries are loading the system, SUM_ROWS_EXAMINED from the

In this blog, I will share the steps I took to debug an error ‘ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error 168 – ‘Unknown (generic) error from engine’ from storage engine’ while…

The post 1030 Unknown generic error from engine in MySQL first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

Bloom filters are an essential component of an LSM-based database engine like MyRocks. This post will illustrate through a simple example how bloom filters work in MyRocks.

Why?

With MyRocks/RocksDB, data is stored in a set of large SST files.  When MyRocks needs to find the value associated with a given key, it uses a bloom filter to guess if the key could potentially be in an SST file.

How?

A bloom filter is a space-efficient way of storing information about a list of keys. At its base, there is a bitmap and a hash function.  The hash value of the keys stored in an SST is computed, and the results are used to set some bits to “1” in the bitmap.  When you want to know if a key is present or not in the list, you run it through the hash function and check if the corresponding bits in the bitmap are …

Percona XtraBackup is an open source hot backup utility for MySQL-based servers. To take consistent and hot backup, it uses various locking methods, especially for non-transactional storage engine tables. This blog post discusses the cause and possible solution for queries with ​Waiting for table flush state in processlist when taking backups using Percona XtraBackup. Only MySQL 5.7 version is affected by this, as per my tests.

Type of locks taken by Percona XtraBackup

Before discussing the main issue, let’s learn about the type of locks used by Percona XtraBackup to take consistent backups. Percona XtraBackup uses backup locks as a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK. This feature is …

Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col), it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just use what they happen to like, while there is a substantial difference in performance and even query results. Also, we find a difference in execution on InnoDB and MyISAM engines.

NOTE: All tests were applied for MySQL version 8.0.30, and in the background, I ran every query three to five times to make sure that all of them were fully cached in the buffer pool (for InnoDB) or by the filesystem (for MyISAM).

Count function for Innodb engine:

Let’s have look at the following series of examples for InnoDB engine:

CREATE TABLE count_innodb (
  id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  val_with_nulls int(11) default NULL,
  val_no_null int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY idx (id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

(mysql) > select count(*) from count_innodb; …

I wrote this post on MyRocks because I believe it is the most interesting new MySQL storage engine to have appeared over the last few years. Although MyRocks is very efficient for writes, I chose a more generic workload that will provide a different MyRocks use case.

The use case is the TPC-C benchmark but executed not on a high-end server but on a lower-spec virtual machine that is I/O limited like for example, with AWS EBS volumes. I decided to use a virtual machine with two CPU cores, four GB of memory, and storage limited to a maximum of 1000 IOPs of 16KB. The storage device has performance characteristics pretty similar to an AWS gp2 EBS volume of about 330 GB in size. I emulated these limits using the KVM iotune settings in my lab.

<iotune>
     <total_iops_sec>1000</total_iops_sec>
     <total_bytes_sec>16384000</total_bytes_sec> …

One of the questions I am often asked is in what cases I would prefer MyRocks over InnoDB. We have covered MyRocks in our blog previously:

MyRocks Performance – Percona Database Performance Blog

Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud – Percona Database Performance Blog

But it would be good to refresh some materials.

This time I want to take an interesting (and real) data set, which I also covered previously: the Reddit Comments dataset (see Big Dataset: All Reddit Comments – Analyzing with ClickHouse – Percona Database Performance Blog). The dataset is still available for download from …

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.29-21, we added one more patch that helps us to build server code on macOS. To be precise here, we still could do this even before this patch but only partially. Now it is possible to build RocksDB Storage Engine as well.

A word of disclaimer here, at the moment, by macOS we still understand macOS for Intel x86_64 architecture (the most recent ARM versions with Apple M1 / M2 processors are out of the scope of this blog post). Moreover, Percona does not provide …

When Index Condition Pushdown is used, you cannot trust rows examined as reported by the slow query log (nor in some Performance Schema tables) and you cannot trust the global status Innodb_rows_read (nor the InnoDB Metrics dml_reads).  These can lead to an incorrect query complexity analysis, to a mistaken estimation of the total load of a MySQL server, and to a lot of wasted time.&

If you ever had to deal with performance and/or disk space issues related to temporary tables, I bet you eventually found yourself puzzled. There are many possible scenarios depending on the type of temporary table, settings, and MySQL version used. We have observed a pretty long evolution in that matter due to a couple of reasons. One of them was the need to completely eliminate the need to use the deprecated MyISAM engine, and at the same time introduce more performant and reliable alternatives. Another set of improvements was required related to InnoDB, where it was necessary to lower the overhead of temporary tables using that engine.

For that reason, I decided to gather them in a sort of summary which may help to troubleshoot their usage. Due to vast changes between major MySQL releases, I divided the article by them.

…