Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
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 [...]
Goal driven performance optimization
When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]
To find the bottleneck, stop guessing and start measuring
We recently examined a customer’s system to try to speed up an ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) process for a big data set into a sort of datamart or DW. What we typically do is ask customers to run the process in question, and then examine what’s happening. In this case, the (very large, powerful) [...]
Stored Function to generate Sequences
Today a customer asked me to help them to convert their sequence generation process to the stored procedure and even though I have already seen it somewhere I did not find it with two minutes of googling so I wrote a simple one myself and posting it here for public benefit or my later use
Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II
I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]
Using GROUP BY WITH ROLLUP for Reporting Performance Optimization
Quite typical query for reporting applications is to find top X values. If you analyze Web Site logs you would look at most popular web pages or search engine keywords which bring you most of the traffic. If you’re looking at ecommerce reporting you may be interested in best selling product or top sales people. [...]
FaceBook Search, Search for social networks
Yesterday I ran into the article which sheds some light on FaceBook search implementation. As we’re recently a lot into search having implemented a bunch of search projects ourselves and helped number a of customers with their full text search needs I decided to post my thoughts on this matter. First I was surprised article [...]

