I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
MySQL Upgrade Webinar Questions Followup
I did a Webinar about MySQL Upgrade – Best Practices Yesterday and there were some questions we could not answer during Webinar, following Jay’s Lead I decided to post them as a Blog Post. Q: Can you go directly MySQL 5.0 to 5.5 for MyISAM tables? MyISAM have not been getting any significant development since [...]
ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size
Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Find and remove duplicate indexes
Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]
Building Indexes by Sorting In Innodb (AKA Fast Index Creation)
Innodb can indexes built by sort since Innodb Plugin for MySQL 5.1 which is a lot faster than building them through insertion, especially for tables much larger than memory and large uncorrelated indexes you might be looking at 10x difference or more. Yet for some reason Innodb team has chosen to use very small (just [...]
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 [...]
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]

