May 23, 2013

Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list

I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]

EXPLAIN EXTENDED can tell you all kinds of interesting things

While many people are familiar with the MySQL EXPLAIN command, fewer people are familiar with “extended explain” which was added in MySQL 4.1 EXPLAIN EXTENDED can show you what the MySQL optimizer does to your query. You might not know this, but MySQL can dramatically change your query before it actually executes it. This process [...]

Star Schema Bechmark: InfoBright, InfiniDB and LucidDB

In my previous rounds with DataWarehouse oriented engines I used single table without joins, and with small (as for DW) datasize (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/). Addressing these issues, I took Star Schema Benchmark, which is TPC-H modification, and tried run queries against InfoBright, InfiniDB, LucidDB and MonetDB. I did not get results for MonetDB, will [...]

Air traffic queries in MyISAM and Tokutek (TokuDB)

This is next post in series Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha Let me explain the reason of choosing these engines. After initial three posts I am often asked “What is baseline ? Can we compare results with standard MySQL engines [...]

Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers

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 [...]

A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL

Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]

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 adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?

JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]

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 [...]

Using delayed JOIN to optimize count(*) and LIMIT queries

In many Search/Browse applications you would see main (fact) table which contains search fields and dimension tables which contain more information about facts and which need to be joined to get query result. If you’re executing count(*) queries for such result sets MySQL will perform the join even if you use LEFT JOIN so it [...]