Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
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 [...]
The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O
April 28, 2008 By 17 Comments
In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]
Be careful when joining on CONCAT
October 16, 2007 By 15 Comments
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 [...]
Merge Tables Gotcha
May 9, 2007 By 4 Comments
I had the interesting customer case today which made me to do a bit research on the problem. You can create merge table over MyISAM tables which contain primary key and global uniqueness would not be enforced in this case, this is as far as most people will think about it. In fact however it [...]
MySQL Session variables and Hints
December 28, 2006 By 2 Comments
MySQL has two ways to find tune execution of particular query. First is MySQL Hints, such as SQL_BIG_RESULT, STRAIGHT_JOIN, FORCE INDEX etc. You place these directly into the query to change how query is executed for example SELECT STRAIGHT_JOIN * FROM A FORCE INDEX(A) JOIN B The other part is session variable. If you know [...]
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
September 1, 2006 By 100 Comments
Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]
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 [...]
