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.
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Multi-Column IN clause – Unexpected MySQL Issue
We have an application which stores massive amount of urls. To save on indexes instead of using URL we index CRC32 of the URL which allows to find matching urls quickly. There is a bit of chance there would be some false positives but these are filtered out after reading the data so it works [...]
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 [...]
UNION vs UNION ALL Performance
When I was comparing performance of UNION vs MySQL 5.0 index merge algorithm Sinisa pointed out I should be using UNION ALL instead of simple UNION in my benchmarks, and he was right. Numbers would be different but it should not change general point of having optimization of moving LIMIT inside of union clause being [...]
How simple answer are you looking for ?
I’ve got an interesting comment the other day saying “I’ve heard Jay Pipes saying indexes with cardinality lower than 30% are worthless, true?” That is interesting question and it has different answers depending on who is asking. A lot of people want to hear simple answers to the questions because they would be overwhelmed by [...]
MySQL automatic data truncation can backfire
I had a fun case today. There is set of cache tables which cache certain content in MyISAM tables and queries for these tables such as:
1 | select data from cache0003 where `key`=2342526263 and real_key='cp_140797_6460aad5d2e50d3e859e8649007686ac'; |
The “key” is CRC32 of the real key which is used to keep index size as small as possible so if we have a cache miss we can [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
MySQL EXPLAIN limits and errors.
Running EXPLAIN for problematic queries is very powerful tool for MySQL Performance optimization. If you’ve been using this tool a lot you probably noticed it is not always provide adequate information. Here is list of things you may wish to watch out. EXPLAIN can be wrong – this does not happen very often but it [...]

