May 21, 2013

Using GROUP BY WITH ROLLUP for Reporting Performance Optimization

Quite typical query for reporting applications is to find top X values. If you analyze Web Site logs you would look at most popular web pages or search engine keywords which bring you most of the traffic. If you’re looking at ecommerce reporting you may be interested in best selling product or top sales people. [...]

How fast can you sort data with MySQL ?

I took the same table as I used for MySQL Group by Performance Tests to see how much MySQL can sort 1.000.000 rows, or rather return top 10 rows from sorted result set which is the most typical way sorting is used in practice. I tested full table scan of the table completes in 0.22 [...]

How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables

As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]

MySQL VIEW as performance troublemaker

I start to see applications being built utilizing VIEWs functionality which appeared in MySQL 5.0 and quite frequently VIEWs are used to help in writing the queries – to keep queries simple without really thinking how it affects server performance. Even worse than that – looking at the short table which just gets single row [...]

Is it query which needs to be optimized ?

Last few days I had a lot of a lot of questions at MySQL Performance Forum as well as from our customers regarding query optimization… which had one thing in common – It is not query which needed to be optimized. Way too frequently people design schema first and then think how the queries they [...]

When EXPLAIN can be misleading

One think I can see with people using EXPLAIN is trusting it too much, ie assuming if number of rows is reported by EXPLAIN is large query must be inefficient. It may not be the case. The question is not only about stats which may be wrong and which is why you may want to [...]

Using Sphinx as MySQL data retrieval accelerator

I’ve run into the following thread couple of days ago: Basically someone is using sphinx to perform search simply on attributes (date, group etc) and get sorted result set and claiming it is way faster than getting it with MySQL. Honestly I can well believe it for cases when you want to know number of [...]

Database access Optimization in Web Applications.

This is pretty simple approach I often use called to optimize web application performance if problem happens with few pages. If we have “everything is slow” problem looking at slow query logs may be better start. So what could you do ? Look at the information shown on the page which comes from database. This [...]

ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization

Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]

MySQL: Followup on UNION for query optimization, Query profiling

Few days ago I wrote an article about using UNION to implement loose index scan. First I should mention double IN also works same way so you do not have to use the union. So changing query to:

So as you see there are really different types of ranges in MySQL. IN range allows [...]