Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
COUNT(*) vs COUNT(col)
April 10, 2007 By 45 Comments
Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col) it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just using what they happen to like, while there is substantial difference in performance and even query result. Lets look at the following series of examples:
Using delayed JOIN to optimize count(*) and LIMIT queries
April 6, 2007 By 22 Comments
In many Search/Browse applications you would see main (fact) table which contains search fields and dimension tables which contain more information about facts and which need to be joined to get query result. If you’re executing count(*) queries for such result sets MySQL will perform the join even if you use LEFT JOIN so it [...]
Is it query which needs to be optimized ?
March 6, 2007 By 9 Comments
Last few days I had a lot of a lot of questions at MySQL Performance Forum as well as from our customers regarding query optimization… which had one thing in common – It is not query which needed to be optimized. Way too frequently people design schema first and then think how the queries they [...]
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
September 1, 2006 By 100 Comments
Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]
Duplicate indexes and redundant indexes
August 17, 2006 By 38 Comments
About every second application I look at has some tables which have redundant or duplicate indexes so its the time to speak about these a bit. So what is duplicate index ? This is when table has multiple indexes defined on the same columns. Sometimes it is indexes with different names, sometimes it is different [...]
Database problems in MySQL/PHP Applications
August 11, 2006 By 13 Comments
Article about database design problems is being discussed by Kristian. Both article itself and responce cause mixed feellings so I decided it is worth commenting: 1. Using mysql_* functions directly This is probably bad but I do not like solutions proposed by original article ether. PEAR is slow as well as other complex conectors. I [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
July 30, 2006 By 30 Comments
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
Using MyISAM in production
June 17, 2006 By 36 Comments
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
Join performance of MyISAM and Innodb
May 29, 2006 By 6 Comments
We had discussion today which involved benchmarks of Join speed for MyISAM and Innodb storage engines for CPU bound workload, this is when data size is small enough to fit in memory and so buffer pool. I tested very simple table, having with about 20.000 rows in it on 32bit Linux. The columns “id” “i” [...]
