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 [...]
PROCEDURE ANALYSE
March 23, 2009 By 9 Comments
Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
December 22, 2008 By 13 Comments
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
JOIN Performance & Charsets
October 21, 2008 By 2 Comments
We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you’ve inherited a schema that you can’t change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries. Take [...]
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
August 9, 2008 By 24 Comments
Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]
MySQL 6.0 vs 5.1 in TPC-H queries
March 25, 2008 By 17 Comments
Last week I played with queries from TPC-H benchmarks, particularly comparing MySQL 6.0.4-alpha with 5.1. MySQL 6.0 is interesting here, as there is a lot of new changes in optimizer, which should affect execution plan of TPC-H queries. In reality only two queries (from 22) have significantly better execution time (about them in next posts), [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
October 12, 2007 By 10 Comments
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
June 18, 2007 By 18 Comments
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression
May 13, 2006 By 4 Comments
MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]
