I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
How to convert MySQL’s SHOW PROFILES into a real profile
SHOW PROFILES shows how much time MySQL spends in various phases of query execution, but it isn’t a full-featured profile. By that, I mean that it doesn’t show similar phases aggregated together, doesn’t sort them by worst-first, and doesn’t show the relative amount of time consumed. I’ll profile the “nicer_but_slower_film_list” included with the Sakila sample [...]
Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer
Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]
Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views
If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]
3 ways MySQL uses indexes
I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.
Talking MySQL to Sphinx
In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.

