innodb

Switching from MySQL/MyISAM to Galera Cluster requires that all tables (except those from the mysql, information_schema and performance_schema) are using the InnoDB Storage Engine.

For altering the Storage Engine of the tables we wrote a script (alter_engine.pl) long time ago already. Because we have made many of those switches recently we have extended its functionality.

In this weeks MySQL workshop we were discussing, beside other things, about the innodb_file_per_table parameter and its advantages of enabling it. In addition there was a discussion if the InnoDB system tablespace file can be shrinked once it has been grown very large or not. We all know the answer: The InnoDB system tablespace file does never shrink again.

Recently a customer has shown up with some deadlocks occurring frequently. They were of the following type (I have shortened the output a bit):

Es ist ein bekanntes Problem, dass das Ändern der Storage Engine von MyISAM nach InnoDB Probleme verursachen kann [ 1 ], wenn Abfragen der folgenden Art auftreten:

SELECT COUNT(*) from table;

Glücklicherweise kommt dieser Typ von Abfragen selten vor. Und wenn, kann die Abfrage meist einfach weggelassen oder darum herum gearbeitet werden, indem man die Anzahl Zeilen in der Tabelle schätzt. Zum Beispiel mit:

Its a known problem that changing the Storage Engine from MyISAM to InnoDB can cause some problems [ 1 ] if you have queries of this type:

SELECT COUNT(*) from table;

Luckily this query happens rarely and if, the query can be easily omitted or worked around by guesstimating the amount of rows in the table. For example with:

Um es nicht allzu einfach zu machen ist unsere Tabelle auch noch partitioniert. Sie sieht wie folgt aus:

Because we are a bit short off disk space on one of our servers I had the idea to try out the MySQL feature Data Compression for InnoDB. This feature is useful if you have tables with VARCHAR, BLOB or TEXT attributes.

To not make it not too simple our table is partitioned as well. Our table looks like this:

Helsinki, Finland, Uster, Switzerland – February 18, 2012 – Codership, the provider of Galera Cluster for MySQL, and FromDual, a MySQL consulting company, today announced collaboration to offer Galera Cluster technology and related support and consulting services for Galera users all over the world, especially in German speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH). Galera Cluster is a synchronous, true multi-master replication cluster for MySQL using the well known InnoDB storage engine.

Recently I found in a forum the following request for help:

Introduction

Recently a customer claimed that his queries were slow some times and sometimes they were fast.

First idea: Flipping query execution plan caused by InnoDB could be skipped because it affected mainly MyISAM tables.

Second idea: Caching effects by either the file system cache caching MyISAM data or the MyISAM key buffer caching MyISAM indexes were examined: File system cache was huge and MyISAM key buffer was only used up to 25%.

I was a bit puzzled...

Abstract: In this article we discuss how big is the performance impact of MySQL TRIGGERs compared to application side logging (with INSERT) into a MySQL table.

Mit dem neuen MySQL Release 5.6 sind einige neue InnoDB Data Dictionary Tabellen zum INFORMATION_SCHEMA hinzu gekommen:

Neu in MySQL 5.5 sind:

Neu in MySQL 5.6 sind:

With the new MySQL 5.6 release there are some more InnoDB Data Dictionary Tables in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA:

New with MySQL 5.5 are:

New with MySQL 5.6 are:

Abstract: Heating up the InnoDB Buffer Pool during the MySQL instance startup should significantly improve InnoDB Performance in the beginning of the life of the Instance. This is achieved by sequential scans of the needed data instead of random I/O reads which would happen when we just let the system work it out by itself.
How to find the database objects which can be loaded during MySQL start-up and how to load them automatically is described in this article.

We have just released v0.7.1 of the FromDual MySQL Performance Monitor. The new release can be downloaded from here.

In all editions some error messages have been cleaned-up, the fall-back data gather method mysql has been removed and the Maria SE template has been renamed to Aria.

In the edition dedicated to our customers most of the InnoDB graphs which are available with MEM v2.3.3 have been implemented now.

In the old days everything was simpler. We had one maker of our favourite database management system and possibly the choice between different Storage Engines. Mostly the decision has to be taken between MyISAM and InnoDB. When you care about your data integrity you have chosen InnoDB.

Nowadays it is more complex. We have several different makers of our favourite database management system: Oracle/MySQL, Monty Program AB and Percona with their products: MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server.

We recently had the case with one of our customers where we got externally generated random hash values (up to 70 bytes) and they were used as Primary Keys in InnoDB.

As we know, this is not a very good idea because the size of all secondary indexes becomes large and because a random hash value as a Primary Key gives us a bad locality of our rows in the table ¹.

InnoDB is known to have crash-recovery capabilities and thus is called a crash safe storage engine (in contrary to MyISAM). Nevertheless under certain circumstances it seems like InnoDB pages can get corrupt during a crash and then a manual crash-recovery is needed.

Recently we had a case where a customer got some corrupted blocks in his InnoDB tables. His largest tables where quite big, about 30 to 100 Gbyte. Why he got this corrupted blocks we did not find out yet (disk broken?).

When you have corrupted blocks in InnoDB, it is mandatory to get rid of them again. Otherwise your database can crash suddenly.