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 [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
December 29, 2011 By 3 Comments
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
SELECT UNION Results INTO OUTFILE
September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick tip I know some of us has overlooked at some point. When doing SELECT … UNION SELECT, where do you put the the INTO OUTFILE clause? On the first SELECT, on the last or somewhere else? The manual has the answer here, to quote: Only the last SELECT statement can use INTO [...]
Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query
May 14, 2011 By 27 Comments
Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]
Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)
May 6, 2011 By 23 Comments
Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]
Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies
February 14, 2011 By 18 Comments
Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]
When the subselect runs faster
March 18, 2010 By 9 Comments
A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:
1 | SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE (col1='A'||col1='B') ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0 |
This column in the table is looks like this:
1 | `col1` enum('A','B','C','CD','DE','F','G','HI') default NULL |
The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
3 ways MySQL uses indexes
September 12, 2009 By 28 Comments
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.
