InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
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 [...]
Percona is hiring performance experts
Percona is hiring. We’ve added several experts recently and we’re growing at a fast but sustainable pace. The demand for our services is strong, and we have openings for more experts in the next couple of months. Let me explain a little about what we’re looking for at the moment. While we do have a [...]
Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?
There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]
How Percona Develops Open-Source Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are [...]
Goal driven performance optimization
When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]
How expensive is a WHERE clause in MySQL?
This is a fun question I’ve been wanting to test for some time. How much overhead does a trivial WHERE clause add to a MySQL query? To find out, I set my InnoDB buffer pool to 256MB and created a table that’s large enough to test, but small enough to fit wholly in memory:
ANALYZE: MyISAM vs Innodb
Following up on my Previous Post I decided to do little test to see how accurate stats we can get for for Index Stats created by ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM and Innodb. But before we go into that I wanted to highlight about using ANALYZE TABLE in production as some people seems to be thinking [...]
Missing Data – rows used to generate result set
As Baron writes it is not the number of rows returned by the query but number of rows accessed by the query will most likely be defining query performance. Of course not all row accessed are created equal (such as full table scan row accesses may be much faster than random index lookups row accesses [...]

