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 [...]
When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?
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. [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
Emulating global transaction ID with pt-heartbeat
Global transaction IDs are being considered for a future version of MySQL. A global transaction ID lets you determine a server’s replication position reliably, among other benefits. This is great when you need to switch a replica to another master, or any number of other needs. Sometimes you can’t wait for the real thing, but [...]
When EXPLAIN estimates can go wrong!
I have been working with a few customer cases and one interesting case popped up. The customer was facing a peculiar problem where the rows column in the EXPLAIN output of the query was totally off. The actual number of rows was 18 times more than the number of rows reported by MySQL in the [...]
Infinite Replication Loop
Last week I helped 2 different customers with infinite replication loops. I decided to write a blog post about these infinite loop of binary log statements in MySQL Replication. To explain what they are, how to identify them… and how to fix them.
Joining on range? Wrong!
The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]
Air traffic queries in MyISAM and Tokutek (TokuDB)
This is next post in series Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha Let me explain the reason of choosing these engines. After initial three posts I am often asked “What is baseline ? Can we compare results with standard MySQL engines [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
3 ways MySQL uses indexes
I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.

