May 23, 2013

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

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 [...]

Logging Deadlock errors

The principal source of information for InnoDB diagnostics is the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS but there are some sections that are not very useful. For example, LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK only shows, as the name implies, the latest error detected. If you have 100 deadlocks per minute you will be able to see only [...]

Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB

Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]

PROCEDURE ANALYSE

Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space [...]

Redundant index is not always bad

About year ago Peter wrote about redundant indexes and mentioned sometimes it is good to leave two indexes, even one is first part of another. I’m speaking about BTREE indexes, for example, KEY (A), and KEY (A,B). From SQL point of view KEY(A) is not needed, as for queries like WHERE A=5 the index (A,B) [...]

Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables

I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]