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 [...]
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 [...]
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:
Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.
February 16, 2007 By 8 Comments
One interesting problem with MySQL Optimizer I frequently run into is making poor decision when it comes to choosing between using index for ORDER BY or using index for restriction. Consider we’re running web site which sell goods, goods may be from different categories, different sellers different locations which can be filtered on, and there [...]
