Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Falcon Storage Engine Design Review
Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]
MySQL Optimizer and Innodb Primary Key
Innodb primary key is special in many senses and I was always wondering how well MySQL is integrated with Innodb to take advantage of these special features. Lets see which things work and which things do not:
Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables
I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]
Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?
If you’ve been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions [...]
Join performance of MyISAM and Innodb
We had discussion today which involved benchmarks of Join speed for MyISAM and Innodb storage engines for CPU bound workload, this is when data size is small enough to fit in memory and so buffer pool. I tested very simple table, having with about 20.000 rows in it on 32bit Linux. The columns “id” “i” [...]
To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression
MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]

