About 2 weeks ago Oracle published the MySQL 5.7.7-labs-json version which includes a very interesting feature called “Generated columns” (also know as Virtual or Computed columns). MariaDB has a similar feature as well: Virtual (Computed) Columns.

The idea is very simple: if we store a column

`FlightDate` date

in our table we may want to filter or group by year(FlightDate), month(FlightDate) or even dayofweek(FlightDate). The “brute-force” approach: use the above Date and Time MySQL functions in the query; however it will prevent MySQL from using an index (see below). Generated columns will allow you to declare a “Virtual”, non-stored column …

I often talk with people who are very interested in the features of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) such as synchronous and parallel replication, multi-node writing and high availability. However some get confused when operating a real PXC cluster because they do not fully realize the implications of these features. So here is a fun way to test your PXC knowledge: try to solve these 12 questions related to PXC! (you will find the answers at the end of the post.)

Workload

1. With Galera 3.x, support for MyISAM is experimental. When can we expect to have full MyISAM support?
a. This will never happen as Galera is designed for transactional storage engines.
b. This is planned for Galera 4.0.

2. Why aren’t all workloads a good fit for PXC?
a. Execution plans can change compared to a regular MySQL server, so performance is sometimes not as good as with a regular MySQL server.
b. Large …

I have recently seen several cases when performance for MySQL queries on a single table was terrible. The reason was simple: the wrong indexes were added and so the execution plan was poor. Here are guidelines to help you optimize various kinds of single-table queries.

Disclaimer: I will be presenting general guidelines and I do not intend to cover all scenarios. I am pretty confident that you can find examples where what I am writing does not work, but I am also confident that it will help you most of the time. Also I will not discuss features you can find in MySQL 5.6+ like Index Condition Pushdown to keep things simple. Be aware that such features can actually make a significant difference in query response time (for good or for bad).

What an index can do for you

An index can perform up to 3 actions: filter, sort/group and cover. While the first 2 actions are self-explanatory, not everyone may know what …

MySQL sharding is one of the most used and surely the most abused MySQL scaling technology. My April 2 Dzone article, “To Shard, or Not to Shard,” proved there is indeed quite an interest in this topic.

As such, I’m hosting a live webinar tomorrow (April 22) that will shed light on questions about sharding with MySQL. It’s titled: To Shard or Not to Shard That is the Question!

I’ll be answering questions such as:

• Is sharding right for your application or should you use other scaling technologies?
• If you’re sharding, what things do you need to consider and which questions do you need to have answered?
• What kind of specific technologies can assist you with sharding?

I hope …

When optimizing queries and investigating performance issues, MySQL comes with built in support for profiling queries aka

SET profiling = 1;

 . This is already awesome and simple to use, but why the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA alternative?

Because profiling will be removed soon (already deprecated on MySQL 5.6 ad 5.7); the built-in profiling capability can only be enabled per session. This means that you cannot capture profiling information for queries running from other connections. If you are using Percona Server, the profiling option for log_slow_verbosity is a nice alternative, unfortunately, not everyone is using Percona Server.

Now, for a quick demo: I execute a …

Data inconsistencies in replication environments are a pretty common. There are lots of posts that explain how to fix those using pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync. Usually we only care about the data but from time to time we receive this question in support:

How can I check the table definition consistency between servers?

Replication also allow us to have different table definition between master and slaves. For example, there are some cases that you need some indexes on slaves for querying purposes but are not really needed on the master. There are some other cases where those differences are just a mistake that needs to be fixed.

…

MySQL Fabric is a great tool for managing a farm of MySQL servers. In the last two posts you can see how High Availability Fail over and Sharding work. When things are working right, the group lookup_servers will look something like this:
server_uuid address status mode weight
------------------------------------ ----------- --------- ---------- ------
09d13be1-cdd0-11e4-8643-0800273b9c80 10.10.13.10 SECONDARY READ_ONLY 1.0
0f611996-cdd0-11e4-8643-0800273b9c80 10.10.13.20 SECONDARY READ_ONLY 1.0
11aae7e7-cdd0-11e4-8643-0800273b9c80 10.10.13.30 PRIMARY READ_WRITE 1.0

This is a three node farm with a PRIMARY for READ-WRITE operations and two …

A few years back Deva wrote about how to use tcpdump on very busy hosts. That post sparked my interest about exploring how to measure the impact of tcpdump on very busy hosts. In this post, I wanted to highlight how much of an impact there really is and what options you have to make the query collection much more effective.

Some things you need to know:

• The test is a sysbench read-only workload, 8 tables, 8 threads, 1000000 rows each with 16G of buffer pool. Dataset fully in memory.
• sysbench is ran on the same host, on 1Gbps connection, sysbench can saturate the network and therefore affect my network test with netcat so I decided to run locally.
• There are 13 tests, 5 minutes each with 1 minute interval, varying on how the dump file is captured.
  • First one as …

Recently, I was working on one of the issue related to locks and deadlocks with InnoDB tables and I found very interesting details about how InnoDB locks and deadlocks works with or without index for different Isolation levels.

Here, I would like to describe a small test case about how SELECT ..FOR UPDATE (with and without limit) behave with INSERT/UPDATE and with READ-COMMITED and REPEATABLE-READ Isolation levels. I’m creating a small table data_col with few records. Initially, this test case was written by Bill Karwin to explain details to customer, but here I have used a bit modified test case.

CREATE TABLE data_col (dataname VARCHAR(10), period INT, expires DATE, host VARCHAR(10));

INSERT INTO data_col VALUES (‘med1′, …

Every day hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted by allowing improperly tuned or misconfigured systems, misunderstood infrastructure, and inefficient IT operations to live and thrive in data centers around the globe. There are both direct and indirect costs associated with allowing these unhealthy systems to continue to exist. Let’s look at some.

The setup:

Let us start by using a small example. We will start by looking at a small database setup. This setup will have a single master-slave, with a database size of lets say 500GB. Traffic is steady and let’s say this translates into 500 IOPS on the master. You have chosen to host this on Amazon’s AWS. A common way of ensuring backups occur in AWS is to setup ebs snapshots of the slave. In terms of usage, let us assume your CPU is about 50% used and you have about 20GB of hot data that needs to stay in the memory for the database.

If we look at what this …