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 [...]
Be careful when joining on CONCAT
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 [...]
Is it query which needs to be optimized ?
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 [...]
Database access Optimization in Web Applications.
This is pretty simple approach I often use called to optimize web application performance if problem happens with few pages. If we have “everything is slow” problem looking at slow query logs may be better start. So what could you do ? Look at the information shown on the page which comes from database. This [...]
GROUP_CONCAT useful GROUP BY extension
MySQL has useful extention to the GROUP BY operation: function GROUP_CONCAT: GROUP_CONCAT(expr) – This function returns a string result with the concatenated non-NULL values from a group. Where it can be useful?
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
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 [...]
MySQL EXPLAIN limits and errors.
Running EXPLAIN for problematic queries is very powerful tool for MySQL Performance optimization. If you’ve been using this tool a lot you probably noticed it is not always provide adequate information. Here is list of things you may wish to watch out. EXPLAIN can be wrong – this does not happen very often but it [...]

