In browsing the BZR tree for lp:mysql-server, I noticed some rather exciting code had been merged into the Innobase code.

You may be aware that InnoDB will do some index dives when opening a table to get some statistics about the indexes that can help the optimiser make good query plans.

The problem being that this is many disk seeks. It means that on server restart, you have to spend a whole bunch of time seeking around the disk reading index pages.

Not any more.

There is now code merged in to store the calculated statistics in a table inside InnoDB so that these index dives don’t have to happen on startup.

Originally, this looked like it was going to make it into InnoDB+. The good news is that it’s now in a public source tree. I look forward to when it hits a stable release.

(hopefully somebody other than me can beat me to it and write a nice description of the algorithms involved… the code is pretty easy to follow, so it shouldn’t be hard)