One of the most typical reasons for performance and scalability problems I encounter is simply failing to do the math. And these are typically bad one because it often leads to implementing architectures which are not up for job they are intended to solve. Let me start with example to make it clear. Lets say [...]
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 [...]
Multiple column index vs multiple indexes
August 22, 2008 By 13 Comments
After my previous post there were questions raised about Index Merge on Multiple Indexes vs Two Column Index efficiency. I mentioned in most cases when query can use both of the ways using multiple column index would be faster but I also went ahead to do some benchmarks today.
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
April 28, 2008 By 12 Comments
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
TPC-H Run on MySQL 5.1 and 6.0
April 10, 2008 By 16 Comments
We were doing MySQL Performance evaluation on TPC-H queries for the client and they kindly allowed us to publish results which are very interesting. This is obviously not audited TPC-H run, and it can’t be because we used MyISAM tables which are not ACID complaint. Plus we only measured Power to keep things simple. We [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
November 3, 2007 By 39 Comments
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
COUNT(*) vs COUNT(col)
April 10, 2007 By 45 Comments
Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col) it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just using what they happen to like, while there is substantial difference in performance and even query result. Lets look at the following series of examples:
To UUID or not to UUID ?
March 13, 2007 By 28 Comments
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1
January 8, 2007 By 117 Comments
Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
