First, a thank you to everyone who attended the webinar Today, I appreciate your time and nice comments. As promised, here are answers to questions that couldn’t be answered during the talk: Q: How do you install the tools? The manual has full details, but it’s important to know that the latest release for [...]
The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection
December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments
Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Full table scan vs full index scan performance
November 23, 2012 By 15 Comments
Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]
devops webinar – follow up Q&A
November 6, 2012 By 5 Comments
First I wanted to thanks all the attendees and for the nice comments I got. As promised during the webinar, these are the answers of the questions you asked. Q: Does Percona provide plugin for cacti? A: Yes we do. They are part of Percona Monitoring Plugins. You can see some examples here. Q: What [...]
Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU
October 27, 2012 By 6 Comments
A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup
October 4, 2012 By 5 Comments
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
Timezone and pt-table-checksum
September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment
I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?
September 11, 2012 By 6 Comments
One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments
While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?
September 4, 2012 By 5 Comments
Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | CREATE TABLE foo ( id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, uid INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, update_time DATETIME NOT NULL, .... INDEX `uid` (uid, update_time), INDEX `bar` (some_other_columns) .... ) ENGINE=InnoDB; |
When he ran this query:
1 | SELECT MIN(update_time) FROM foo WHERE update_time IS NOT NULL AND update_time <> '0000-00-00 00:00:00'; |
The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]
