Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha
November 2, 2009 By 19 Comments
As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment. See my previous posts on this topic: Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB I could not run all queries against InfiniDB and I met some [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
August 1, 2008 By 12 Comments
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Learning about MySQL Table Fragmentation
May 1, 2008 By 20 Comments
Recently I was working with the customer who need quick warmup – to get Innodb table fetched in memory as fast as possible to get good in memory access performance. To do it I run the query: “SELECT count(*) FROM tbl WHERE non_idx_col=0″ I use this particular form of query because it will do full [...]
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 [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments
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 [...]
Possible optimization for sort_merge and UNION ORDER BY LIMIT
September 18, 2007 By 10 Comments
Every so often you need to perform sort results retrieved from MySQL when your WHERE clause goes beyound col=const values which would allow MySQL to still use second portion of the index for the order by. Ranges as well as IN lists make this optimization impossible, not even speaking about index merge optimization. Lets look [...]
To SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS or not to SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS?
August 28, 2007 By 57 Comments
When we optimize clients’ SQL queries I pretty often see a queries with SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS option used. Many people think, that it is faster to use this option than run two separate queries: one – to get a result set, another – to count total number of rows. In this post I’ll try to check, is [...]
