MySQL’s innodb_file_per_table is a wonderful thing – most of the time. Having every table use its own .ibd file allows you to easily reclaim space when dropping or truncating tables. But in some use cases, it may cause significant performance issues.
Many of you in the audience are responsible for running automated tests on your codebase before deploying to production. If you are, then one of your goals is having tests run as quickly as possible so you can run them as frequently as possible. Often times you can change specific settings in your test environment that don’t affect the outcome of the test, but do improve throughput. This post discusses how innodb_file_per_table is one of those settings.
I recently spoke with a customer whose use case involved creating hundreds of tables on up to 16 schemas …
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