One schema optimization we often do is extending index when there are queries which can use more key part. Typically this is safe operation, unless index length increases dramatically queries which can use index can also use prefix of the new index are they ? It turns there are special cases when this is not [...]
Extending Index for Innodb tables can hurt performance in a surprising way
May 22, 2010 By 10 Comments
Is your server’s performance about to degrade?
May 18, 2010 By 13 Comments
I’ve been talking and writing a bit lately about the scaling problems I’m seeing on fast servers running lots of queries. As a rough guide, I’m seeing this in servers running 20k queries per second and higher, lots of memory, lots of CPU cores, and most queries are running faster than one millisecond; some in [...]
Introducing percona-patches for 5.1
February 9, 2010 By 21 Comments
Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest. You can read about SecondLife’s experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog. The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS). Despite having many requests to port [...]
Great work Innodb Team
November 30, 2009 By 8 Comments
I thought I should praise Innodb team for all the work they have been doing recently. We see a lot of cool stuff happening, especially in the area of our interest which is Performance And Scalability. Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 had a lot of great performance improvements and 1.0.5/1.0.6 gets even further with long standing caching [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
November 18, 2009 By 4 Comments
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
table_cache negative scalability
November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 1
October 15, 2009 By 16 Comments
All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why? Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application? Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who [...]
How number of columns affects performance ?
September 28, 2009 By 11 Comments
It is pretty understood the tables which have long rows tend to be slower than tables with short rows. I was interested to check if the row length is the only thing what matters or if number of columns we have to work with also have an important role. I was interested in peak row [...]
Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers
September 20, 2009 By 4 Comments
I spend large portion of my life working on MySQL Performance Optimization and so MySQL Optimizer is quite important to me. For probably last 10 years I chased first Monty and later Igor with Optimizer complains and suggestions. Here are some general ideas which I think can help to make optimizer in MySQL, MariaDB or [...]
