MySQL 4.1 Binary Log name change

By Jules Szemere | June 30, 2005 | Open source

We recently made the jump to MySQL 4.1 at SitePoint and it’s mostly been smooth sailing. Though I have to admit that it hasn’t offered any of the performance increases that I had hoped for.

Just a heads up – as I’ve not seen this covered anywhere yet – that the default filenames created by the binary logger have changed.

In all prior versions, they were of this format:
mysql_update_log.xxx

Where xxx increments by 1 every time the logs are rotated. 001, 002, 003, etc.

(Note that the “mysql_update_log” prefix is configurable)

In MySQL 4.1, however, they are of this format:
mysql_update_log.xxxxxx

The point obviously being to cater for installations that reset the counter a lot less frequently than we do. We never get beyond 30 before a complete snapshot and a restart of update logging.

This of course broke our script that compresses these (enormous) logfiles for backup purposes and required a little Friday hack to get back on track.

No mention of this behavioural change in the 4.0 -> 4.1 upgrade FAQ.

Jules Szemere

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{ 4 comments }

Etnu July 4, 2005 at 2:02 pm: You won’t see any significant improvement jumping from mysql 4.0 to 4.1 UNLESS you also upgrade to php5, and begin rewriting your code to use prepared queries.
Some people might see slight increases with full text indexes, InnoDB tables, and the general relative performance of importing data exported by mysqldump.
4.1 is about changing how MySQL works (ultimately in line to become MySQL 5) by adding additional functionality to bring it ahead of the pack.
I’m running MySQL 5 Beta right now in a test environment, and I’m absolutely convinced that it will be the final straw that breaks oracle’s back. Unlike postgreSQL, which is really the only comparable free DB platform that offers everything that Oracle does, MySQL is FAST. Most benchmarks indicate that it’s faster on virtually all operations than Oracle, and the difference isn’t even comparable when you’re dealing with MyISAM (InnoDB has some performance penalties, but there’s no way to avoid them if you want true ACID compliance).
Steffen July 2, 2005 at 8:16 am: You are sure that your admin was not talking about Apache? :-)
dtra July 1, 2005 at 8:59 pm: did you go to mysql 4.1.12
we recently went from 4.1.7 to 4.1.12
and found a huge performance increase
uses threading instead of pre-fork (or something, that’s what our sysadmin said)
danut July 1, 2005 at 4:50 pm: Congratulations about your jump to MySQL 4.1
Good job.