May 22, 2013

MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown

March 14, 2013 By 2 Comments

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

February 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif

January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment

There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Quality Assurance

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software

How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?

September 11, 2012 By 6 Comments

One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Wow. My 6 year old MySQL Bug is finally fixed in MySQL 5.6

August 30, 2012 By 2 Comments

I got the message in the morning today about the bug being fixed in MySQL 5.6.6…. which I reported in Early 2006 (while still being with MySQL) and running MySQL 4.1 I honestly thought this issue was fixed long ago as it was indeed pretty annoying. I must say I’m very impressed with Oracle team [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage

March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments

One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL
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