Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Full table scan vs full index scan performance
Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]
Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do
pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex. Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities. Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs. The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]
Using pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster
As of Percona Toolkit v2.1.5, pt-table-checksum works correctly with Percona XtraDB Cluster, but it doesn’t work quite like a traditional replication setup because cluster nodes are not like traditional replicas. In this post I demonstrate how to use pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster. First, you’ll need Percona Toolkit v2.1.5 or newer and Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6 [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
MySQL Upgrade Webinar Questions Followup
I did a Webinar about MySQL Upgrade – Best Practices Yesterday and there were some questions we could not answer during Webinar, following Jay’s Lead I decided to post them as a Blog Post. Q: Can you go directly MySQL 5.0 to 5.5 for MyISAM tables? MyISAM have not been getting any significant development since [...]
Index Condition Pushdown in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 and its performance impact
I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions
So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]
When the subselect runs faster
A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:
1 | SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE (col1='A'||col1='B') ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0 |
This column in the table is looks like this:
1 | `col1` enum('A','B','C','CD','DE','F','G','HI') default NULL |
The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]
Blob Storage in Innodb
I’m running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it. How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format. But before we look into how BLOBs are really stored lets see what misconception [...]

