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 [...]
Computing 95 percentile in MySQL
November 28, 2008 By 5 Comments
When doing performance analyzes you often would want to see 95 percentile, 99 percentile and similar values. The “average” is the evil of performance optimization and often as helpful as “average patient temperature in the hospital”. Lets set you have 10000 page views or queries and have average response time of 1 second. What does [...]
Using GROUP BY WITH ROLLUP for Reporting Performance Optimization
September 17, 2007 By 14 Comments
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. [...]
Should MySQL Extend GROUP BY Syntax ?
August 17, 2007 By 11 Comments
Jan has a good article about finding the row matching some value in the group: This is one illustration of group by limitations in SQL language which is not offset by any MySQL specific extensions,yet As you can see if you want to get one row from the group which is sorted some way you [...]
To UUID or not to UUID ?
March 13, 2007 By 28 Comments
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Is it query which needs to be optimized ?
March 6, 2007 By 9 Comments
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 [...]
Falcon Storage Engine Design Review
January 12, 2007 By 19 Comments
Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]
Using Sphinx as MySQL data retrieval accelerator
October 30, 2006 By 25 Comments
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.
September 12, 2006 By 10 Comments
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 [...]
To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression
May 13, 2006 By 4 Comments
MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]
