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 [...]
When should you store serialized objects in the database?
January 21, 2010 By 47 Comments
A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
December 22, 2008 By 13 Comments
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 Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Four ways to optimize paginated displays
September 24, 2008 By 27 Comments
A paginated display is one of the top optimization scenarios we see in the real world. Search results pages, leaderboards, and most-popular lists are good examples. You know the design pattern: display 20 results in some most-relevant order. Show a “next” and “previous” link. And usually, show how many items are in the whole list [...]
MySQL: Data Storage or Data Processing
November 18, 2007 By 9 Comments
I was thinking today of how people tend to use MySQL in modern applications and it stroke me in many cases MySQL is not used to process the data, at least not on the large scale – instead it is used for data storage and light duty data retrieval. Even in this case however the [...]
Power of MySQL Storage Engines
March 5, 2007 By 3 Comments
Where does real power of MySQL Storage Engines, and pluggable storage engines as MySQL 5.1 lays ? It is very much advertised this allows third parties to create their own storage engines and we can see solutions as Solid and PBXT . Plus there is Falcon storage engine being developed inside MySQL. All of these [...]
Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.
February 16, 2007 By 8 Comments
One interesting problem with MySQL Optimizer I frequently run into is making poor decision when it comes to choosing between using index for ORDER BY or using index for restriction. Consider we’re running web site which sell goods, goods may be from different categories, different sellers different locations which can be filtered on, and there [...]
Getting use of Slave in MySQL Replication
February 14, 2007 By 15 Comments
MySQL Replication is asynchronous which causes problems if you would like to use MySQL Slave as it can contain stale data. It is true delay is often insignificant but in times of heavy load or in case you was running some heavy queries on the master which not take time to replicate to the slave [...]
BoardReader – Forum Search Engine
November 29, 2006 By 13 Comments
One may have notice we were not blogging too much recently, this is because we were quite busy, mainly building BoardReader.com – Search Engine which indexes tens of thousands of forums from all over the world. This project was built by us as consulting project so too bad we do not own it completely but [...]
