So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?
September 11, 2012 By 6 Comments
One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
How to convert MySQL’s SHOW PROFILES into a real profile
February 20, 2012 By 12 Comments
SHOW PROFILES shows how much time MySQL spends in various phases of query execution, but it isn’t a full-featured profile. By that, I mean that it doesn’t show similar phases aggregated together, doesn’t sort them by worst-first, and doesn’t show the relative amount of time consumed. I’ll profile the “nicer_but_slower_film_list” included with the Sakila sample [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
December 29, 2011 By 3 Comments
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
Solving INFORMATION_SCHEMA slowness
December 23, 2011 By 25 Comments
Many of us find INFORMATION_SCHEMA painfully slow to work it when it comes to retrieving table meta data. Many people resort to using file system tools instead to find for example how much space innodb tables are using and things like it. Besides being just slow accessing information_schema can often impact server performance dramatically. The [...]
Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer
May 16, 2011 By 5 Comments
Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]
Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query
May 14, 2011 By 27 Comments
Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
November 15, 2010 By 18 Comments
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 [...]
Advanced index analysis with mk-index-usage
November 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries [...]
