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 [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
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 [...]
Another scalability fix in XtraDB
Recent scalability fixes in InnoDB and also Google’s and your SMP fixes almost made InnoDB results acceptable in primary key lookups queries, but secondary indexes were forgotten for some time. Now having Dell PowerEdge R900 on board (16CPU cores, 16GB RAM) I have some time for experiments, and I played with queries
1 | SELECT name FROM sbtest WHERE country_id = ? LIMIT 5 |
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 [...]
JOIN Performance & Charsets
We have written before about the importance of using numeric types as keys, but maybe you’ve inherited a schema that you can’t change or have chosen string types as keys for a specific reason. Either way, the character sets used on joined columns can have a significant impact on the performance of your queries. Take [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
Testing InnoDB “Barracuda” format with compression
New features of InnoDB – compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 | CREATE TABLE `article87` ( `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL, `ext_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `site_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `forum_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `thread_id` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL, `published` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `crawled` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `num_links` smallint(6) NOT NULL, `links_in` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `cache_author` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `cache_site` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `anchor` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `isthread` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `author_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `inserted` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, `fromfile` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `language_id` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `encoding` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `warning` mediumtext NOT NULL, `is_thread_start` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `source` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL, `hash` char(32) NOT NULL, `mod_is` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `is_adult` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `bodyuc` mediumtext NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `ext_key` (`ext_key`), KEY `forum_id` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`published`), KEY `site_id` (`site_id`,`published`), KEY `hash` (`hash`), KEY `forum_id_2` (`forum_id`,`is_thread_start`,`published`), KEY `published` (`published`), KEY `inserted` (`inserted`), KEY `forum_id_3` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`is_thread_start`), KEY `site_id_2` (`site_id`,`author_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; |
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
MySQL: what read_buffer_size value is optimal ?
The more I work with MySQL Performance Optimization and Optimization for other applications the better I understand I have to less believe in common sense or common sense of documentation writers and do more benchmarks and performance research. I just recently wrote about rather surprising results with sort performance and today I’ve discovered even read_buffer_size [...]

