Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
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 [...]
MySQL Users Conference – Innodb
It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]
PBXT benchmarks
The PBXT Storage Engine (http://www.primebase.com/xt/) is getting stable and we decided to benchmark it in different workloads. This time I tested only READ queries, similar to ones in benchmark InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1) The difference is I used new sysbench with Lua scripting language, so all queries were scripted for sysbench.
InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1
Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
Covering index and prefix indexes
I already wrote in the blog as well mentioned in presentation there is often a choice you have to make between having prefix index – which can be significantly smaller in size and having index being covering index, which means query can be executed using only data from the index without reading the row itself. [...]
Feature Idea: Finding columns which query needs to access
In query examinations it is often interesting which columns query needs to access to provide result set as it gives you ideas if you can use covering indexes to speed things up or even cache some data by denormalizing tables. So far it has to be done manually – look at SELECT clause, WHERE clause, [...]
Duplicate indexes and redundant indexes
About every second application I look at has some tables which have redundant or duplicate indexes so its the time to speak about these a bit. So what is duplicate index ? This is when table has multiple indexes defined on the same columns. Sometimes it is indexes with different names, sometimes it is different [...]
To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression
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 [...]
My Innodb Feature wishes
At Users Conference Heikki did good presentation about Innodb planned features. I did not see some of big and tiny wishes listed so I was making notes. Here is what I’d like to see Packed indexes. In many cases then difference in Performace with MyISAM and Innodb is huge for read only workload it is [...]

