Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
How fast can MySQL Process Data
Reading Barons post about Kickfire Appliance and of course talking to them directly I learned a lot in their product is about beating data processing limitations of current systems. This raises valid question how fast can MySQL process (filter) data using it current architecture ? I decided to test the most simple case – what [...]
MySQL Error Message Nonsenses
What MySQL honestly was never good at is giving good helpful error messages. Start with basics for example – The error message in case of syntax error gives you information about tokens near by but little details:
1 2 | mysql> select * from user oder by pwd; ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'by pwd' at line 1 |
It would be much better if MySQL would give error give exact position of error (with complex [...]
How fast can you sort data with MySQL ?
I took the same table as I used for MySQL Group by Performance Tests to see how much MySQL can sort 1.000.000 rows, or rather return top 10 rows from sorted result set which is the most typical way sorting is used in practice. I tested full table scan of the table completes in 0.22 [...]
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 [...]
Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?
I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see [...]
To UUID or not to UUID ?
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Why do you need many apache children ?
I already wrote kind of about same topic a while ago and now interesting real life case makes me to write again Most Web applications we’re working with have single tier web architecture, meaning there is just single set of apache servers server requests and nothing else – no dedicated server for static content, no [...]
Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables
I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]
Using MyISAM in production
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 [...]

