This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown
While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]
FOSDEM 2013: MySQL And Friends Community Dinner
Just like previous years, the ‘MySQL And Friends’ community is gathering to have a dinner on the Saturdaynight of FOSDEM. This time it is on February 2nd, 2013. This year, it will not be an Italian restaurant, but more a Belgian style restaurant, about 10 minutes walk from the FOSDEM event. Mirabelle: http://www.mirabelle.be/index.php?lang=en Chaussée de Boondael, [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
How to recover deleted rows from an InnoDB Tablespace
In my previous post I explained how it could be possible to recover, on some specific cases, a single table from a full backup in order to save time and make the recovery process more straightforward. Now the scenario is worse because we don’t have a backup or the backup restore process doesn’t work. How [...]
Eventual Consistency in MySQL
We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned. But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2 MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high. But [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
MySQL data via a NoSQL solution, Free ticket to Percona Live London
The much-anticipated ability to access MySQL data via a NoSQL solution has been realized. Using HandlerSocket, significant performance gains can be realized for certain workloads. Sound like something you are interested in? Join us for Percona Live London to hear Ryan Lowe, Percona’s Director of American Consulting speak on this subject. In Ryan’s session he [...]
Advanced index analysis with mk-index-usage
The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 3: Subqueries
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1, 2). This post is about subqueries, which in some cases execute outside-in instead of inside-out as users expect.

