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 [...]
MySQL 6.0 vs 5.1 in TPC-H queries
Last week I played with queries from TPC-H benchmarks, particularly comparing MySQL 6.0.4-alpha with 5.1. MySQL 6.0 is interesting here, as there is a lot of new changes in optimizer, which should affect execution plan of TPC-H queries. In reality only two queries (from 22) have significantly better execution time (about them in next posts), [...]
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 [...]
UNION vs UNION ALL Performance
When I was comparing performance of UNION vs MySQL 5.0 index merge algorithm Sinisa pointed out I should be using UNION ALL instead of simple UNION in my benchmarks, and he was right. Numbers would be different but it should not change general point of having optimization of moving LIMIT inside of union clause being [...]
COUNT(*) vs COUNT(col)
Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col) it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just using what they happen to like, while there is substantial difference in performance and even query result. Lets look at the following series of examples:
Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.
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 [...]

