May 22, 2013

Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge

The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]

Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup

If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]

High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL

We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work.  The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]

How much space does empty Innodb table take ?

How much space would empty MyISAM table take ? Probably 8K for .frm file, 1KB for .MYI file and 0 for MYD file. .MYI file can be larger if you have many indexes. How much space will Innodb take:

Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability

I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]

Multiple column index vs multiple indexes

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.

The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O

In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]

MySQL Full Text Search in Action

Preparing to move I’m selling stuff on GumTree which is UK based clone of Craigslist offering similar functionality but with Ads Similarly to Craigslist GumTree is powered by MySQL but unlike craigslist it looks like they are shy in tuning their MySQL Full Text Search index configuration and setting proper ft_min_word_len value. Searching for Audi [...]

Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?

I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]

INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE and REPLACE INTO

Jonathan Haddad writes about REPLACE INTO and INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE. Really, Why MySQL has both of these, especially both are non ANSI SQL extensions ? The story here seems to be the following – REPLACE INTO existed forever, at least since MySQL 3.22 and was a way to do replace faster and what [...]