It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
Extending Index for Innodb tables can hurt performance in a surprising way
May 22, 2010 By 10 Comments
One schema optimization we often do is extending index when there are queries which can use more key part. Typically this is safe operation, unless index length increases dramatically queries which can use index can also use prefix of the new index are they ? It turns there are special cases when this is not [...]
When the subselect runs faster
March 18, 2010 By 9 Comments
A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:
1 | SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE (col1='A'||col1='B') ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0 |
This column in the table is looks like this:
1 | `col1` enum('A','B','C','CD','DE','F','G','HI') default NULL |
The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]
What does Using filesort mean in MySQL?
March 5, 2009 By 27 Comments
If you were interviewing to work at Percona, and I asked you “what does Using filesort mean in EXPLAIN,” what would you say? I have asked this question in a bunch of interviews so far, with smart people, and not one person has gotten it right. So I consider it to be a bad interview [...]
The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O
April 28, 2008 By 17 Comments
In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
The new cool MySQL patch has landed! Check your queries performance!
October 31, 2007 By 16 Comments
Microslow patch is used by many DBAs and developers to accurately time their queries and to catch those which run less than a second as they can also be a performance killer for a busy application. Recently I have started the development of an updated version of the patch. The basic idea is the same [...]
MySQL Performance – eliminating ORDER BY function
October 17, 2007 By 6 Comments
One of the first rules you would learn about MySQL Performance Optimization is to avoid using functions when comparing constants or order by. Ie use indexed_col=N is good. function(indexed_col)=N is bad because MySQL Typically will be unable to use index on the column even if function is very simple such as arithmetic operation. Same can [...]
Be careful when joining on CONCAT
October 16, 2007 By 15 Comments
The other day I had a case with an awful performance of a rather simple join. It was a join on tb1.vid = CONCAT(‘prefix-’, tb2.id) with tb1.vid – indexed varchar(100) and tb2.id – int(11) column. No matter what I did – forced it to use key, forced a different join order, it did not want [...]
Possible optimization for sort_merge and UNION ORDER BY LIMIT
September 18, 2007 By 10 Comments
Every so often you need to perform sort results retrieved from MySQL when your WHERE clause goes beyound col=const values which would allow MySQL to still use second portion of the index for the order by. Ranges as well as IN lists make this optimization impossible, not even speaking about index merge optimization. Lets look [...]
