May 18, 2013

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5

This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]

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: