Month: May 2010

Views: better performance with condition pushdown

MySQL

Justin’s A workaround for the performance problems of TEMPTABLE views post on mysqlperformanceblog.com reminded me of a solution I once saw on a customer’s site.

The customer was using nested views structure, up to depth of some 8-9 views. There were a lot of aggregations along the way, and even the simplest query resulted with a LOT of subqueries, temporary tables, and vast amounts of data, even if only to return with a couple of rows.

While we worked to solve this, a developer showed me his own trick. His trick is now impossible to implement, but there’s a hack around this.

Let’s use the world database to illustrate. Look at the following view definition: Continue reading » “Views: better performance with condition pushdown”

A MyISAM backup is blocking as read-only, including mysqldump backup

MySQL

Actually this is (almost) all I wanted to say. This is intentionally posted with all related keywords in title, in the hope that a related search on Google will result with this post on first page.

I’m just still encountering companies who use MyISAM as their storage engine and are unaware that their nightly backup actually blocks their application, basically rendering their product unavailable for long minutes to hours on a nightly basis.

So this is posted as a warning for those who were not aware of this fact.

There is no hot (non blocking) backup for MyISAM. Closest would be file system snapshot, but even this requires flushing of tables, which may take a while to complete. If you must have a hot backup, then either use replication – and take the risk of the slave not being in complete sync with the master – or use another storage engine, i.e. InnoDB.

Replication configuration checklist

MySQL

This post lists the essential and optional settings for a replication environment.

It does not explain how to create replicating slaves. See How To Setup Replication for that. However, not all configuration options are well understood, and their roles in varying architectures can change.

Here are the settings for a basic Master/Slave(s) replication architecturee.

Essential

  • log-bin: enable binary logs on the master. Replication is based on the master logging all modifying queries (INSERT/CREATE/ALTER/GRANT etc.), and the slaves being able to replicate them.
  • server-id: each machine must have a unique server-id. A slave will not replay queries originating from a server with the same server-id as its own.
  • GRANT: grant a user with REPLICATION SLAVE. The host list must include all replication slave hosts.
  • expire-logs-days: automatically clean up master’s binary logs older than given value. By default, binary logs are never removed.

When working with Master/Slaves replication, one should be prepared to master failure and slave promotion to master. It may be desirable to identify a particular slave as primary candidate for promotion.

Continue reading » “Replication configuration checklist”

EXPLAIN: missing db info

MySQL

I’m further developing a general log hook, which can stream queries from the general log.

A particular direction I’m taking is to filter queries by their type of actions. For example, the tool (oak-hook-general-log) can be instructed to only stream out those queries which involve creation of a temporary table; or those which cause for a filesort, or full index scan, etc.

This is done by evaluating of query execution plans on the fly. I suspect the MySQL query analyzer roughly does the same (as a small part of what it does).

It’s almost nothing one cannot do with sed/awk. However, I bumped into a couple of problems:

  1. The general log (and the mysql.general_log table, in  particular) does not indicate the particular database one is using for the query. Since slow log does indicate this data, I filed a bug on this. I currently solve this by crossing connection id with the process list, where the current database is listed. It’s shaky, but mostly works.
  2. Just realized: there’s no DB info in the EXPLAIN output! It’s weird, since I’ve been EXPLAINing queries for years now. But I’ve always had the advantage of knowing the schema used: either because I was manually executing the query on a known schema, or mk-query-digest was kind enough to let me know.

Continue reading » “EXPLAIN: missing db info”

Discovery of the day: GROUP BY … DESC

MySQL

I happened on a query where, by mistake, an

SELECT ... ORDER BY x DESC LIMIT 1

was written as

SELECT ... GROUP BY x DESC LIMIT 1

And it took me by surprise to realize GROUP BY x DESC is a valid statement. I looked it up: yep! It’s documented.

In MySQL, GROUP BY results are sorted according to the group statement. You can override this by adding ORDER BY NULL (see past post). I wasn’t aware you can actually control the sort order.

Reducing locks by narrowing primary key

MySQL

In a period of two weeks, I had two cases with the exact same symptoms.

Database users were experiencing low responsiveness. DBAs were seeing locks occurring on seemingly normal tables. In particular, looking at Innotop, it seemed that INSERTs were causing the locks.

In both cases, tables were InnoDB. In both cases, there was a PRIMARY KEY on the combination of all 5 columns. And in both cases, there was no clear explanation as for why the PRIMARY KEY was chosen as such.

Choosing a proper PRIMARY KEY

Especially with InnoDB, which uses clustered index structure, the PRIMARY KEY is of particular importance. Besides the fact that a bloated PRIMARY KEY bloats the entire clustered index and secondary keys (see: The depth of an index: primer), it is also a source for locks. It’s true that any UNIQUE KEY can serve as a PRIMARY KEY. But not all such keys are good candidates. Continue reading » “Reducing locks by narrowing primary key”