May 22, 2013

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

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 [...]

A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes

I wanted to share a little rule of thumb I sometimes use to decide which columns should come first in an index. This is not specific to MySQL, it’s generally applicable to any database server with b-tree indexes. And there are a bunch of subtleties, but I will also ignore those for the sake of [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Do you always need index on WHERE column ?

I believe we wrote about this before, but this topic popups again and again. Today I’ve read opinion that if we have clause WHERE has_something=1 we should have index on column has_something (the column has two values 0 and 1). In reality the right answer is not so simple.