May 21, 2013

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference! When picking talks to attend, [...]

Common MySQL traps webinar questions followup

Thanks to all attendees of the webinar yesterday! If you missed it, you can watch the video recording. Here are some questions that remained unanswered due to time constraints. Q: Are there any technical considerations or best practice tips to have a replicated slave in the cloud, for example on Amazon AWS? Hardware resources are [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

Webinar: Avoiding common traps when designing a MySQL application

On January 16th at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern, I will give a webinar about the main traps that are awaiting you when designing and building a stable and high-performance MySQL application. I will discuss a broad range of topics, from hardware and backups to instrumentation and indexing. I often see during my consulting practice [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

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 Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar

I’m hosting MySQL Indexes: Best Practices Webinar next week, Wednesday August 15. In which I will talk about how MySQL indexes are structured and how they can be used, as well as go over the best practices in selecting correct indexes for your database workloads. Indexing looks like a very basic topic, but it is [...]

ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size

Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]

What’s required to tune MySQL?

I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.