May 23, 2013

Optimize Your SQL With Percona’s Online Query Advisor!

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get expert advice on your SQL queries to find problems in them, the same way that programmers can use lint-check tools to warn about bugs in their C?

Such a simple mistake, but it’s the kind of thing that James Bond movies are made of, isn’t it? [...]

Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE

Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]

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 [...]

Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies

Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]

Is there a performance difference between JOIN and WHERE?

I’ve heard this question a lot, but never thought to blog about the answer. “Is there a performance difference between putting the JOIN conditions in the ON clause or the WHERE clause in MySQL?” No, there’s no difference. The following queries are algebraically equivalent inside MySQL and will have the same execution plan.

Personally, [...]

Announcing Percona Performance Conference 2009 on April 22 & 23

…any sessions this year; Peter, Vadim, and the rest of us at Percona submitted over a dozen session proposals, which were initially declined. As …Cabral is organizing.

That’s the back story — now on to the Percona Performance Conference! This is not “another MySQL conference.” It’s a performance…to Santa Clara.

We will not be the only ones speaking at Percona Performance Conference; other experts will join us in making presentations too. …to propose a session, please do so through the Percona Performance Conference website.

The Percona team looks forward to greeting you face to face …

Faster MySQL failover with SELECT mirroring

One of my favorite MySQL configurations for high availability is master-master replication, which is just like normal master-slave replication except that you can fail over in both directions. Aside from MySQL Cluster, which is more special-purpose, this is probably the best general-purpose way to get fast failover and a bunch of other benefits (non-blocking ALTER [...]

Dropping unused indexes

Vadim wrote some time ago about how to find unused indexes with single query. I was working on the system today and found hundreds of unused indexes on dozens of tables so just dropping indexes manually did not look fun. So I extended Vadim’s query to generate ALTER TABLE statements automatically. I also made it [...]

Speaking on MySQL SF Meetup (Nov 3)

November 3rd, I’m speaking at San Francisco MySQL Meetup – The talk will be about Scaling MySQL driven Web Sites by Sharding and Replication. This is Free event and you’re surely most welcome to join. At this point I see there are some 70 people signed up and 59 spots left. BTW: This will not [...]

Unused indexes by single query

Usually unused indexes are devil, they waste diskspace, cache, they make INSERT / DELETE / UPDATE operations slower and what makes them worse – it is hard to find them. But now ( with userstatsV2.patch) you can find all unused indexes (since last restart of mysqld) by single query

As you see query [...]