May 25, 2013

Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?

I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]

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 [...]

MySQL Consulting – Being on your own

About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.

SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through

Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

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 [...]