Optimize your MySQL maintenance tasks to minimize downtime

Maintenance tasks can take a lot more time than expected with large applications, leading to downtime or degraded service. For instance, adding an index with ALTER TABLE seems very easy, but if the table has 50GB of data, the command can run for hours or days and will lock the whole table. In this talk I will show you tips and useful tools that will help you to execute your maintenance jobs efficiently while minimizing the impact on your application.

I will cover the following topics:

• Changing your schema (columns and/or indexes): ALTER TABLE and alternatives
• Defragmenting your data
• Purging and archiving old data with and without partitioning
• Resyncing a replication slave