May 20, 2013

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

February 12, 2013 By 4 Comments

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, [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, MySQL, Percona Live Tagged With: , ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

January 16, 2013 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

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

December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

August 24, 2012 By 5 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL

What’s required to tune MySQL?

July 27, 2011 By 4 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge

September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With:

3 ways MySQL uses indexes

September 12, 2009 By 28 Comments

I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With:

Why you don’t want to shard.

August 6, 2009 By 34 Comments

Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.

The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.

So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.

Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With: , , ,

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With:

RAID and Scale Out Discussions

June 12, 2007 By 3 Comments

Just found this wonderful summary of articles by Jeremy and wanted to give some of my thoughts on the topic. First lets speak about death of the RAID. I think this is far from the case especially if you consider Software RAID here. For many workloads you would like to get RAID just for the [...]

Filed Under: Hardware and Storage Tagged With:
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