I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.
ANALYZE: MyISAM vs Innodb
Following up on my Previous Post I decided to do little test to see how accurate stats we can get for for Index Stats created by ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM and Innodb. But before we go into that I wanted to highlight about using ANALYZE TABLE in production as some people seems to be thinking [...]
Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!
For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]
Performance gotcha of MySQL memory tables
One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I’m going to write about. There is [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
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 [...]
Be careful when joining on CONCAT
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 [...]
InnoDB in self-compiled MySQL 5.1
If you like to compile MySQL from sources by yourself, for different needs, like debugging, testing etc, you probably can face this issue. What I usually do to fast compile and test is
1 2 3 | ./configure --prefix=/dir/to/mysql make make install |
and then, for example, load the dump of InnoDB from previous version:
1 | mysql testdatabase < dump.sql |
I bet you will not notice all your [...]
MySQL Users Conference – Innodb
It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]
PBXT benchmarks
The PBXT Storage Engine (http://www.primebase.com/xt/) is getting stable and we decided to benchmark it in different workloads. This time I tested only READ queries, similar to ones in benchmark InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1) The difference is I used new sysbench with Lua scripting language, so all queries were scripted for sysbench.
Getting MySQL to use full key length
There is one bug, or “missing feature” in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet [...]

