Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit. This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]
Replication of the NOW() function (also, time travel)
Notice the result of the NOW() function in the following query. The query was run on a real database server and I didn’t change the clock of the server or change anything in the database configuration settings.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> SELECT NOW(),SYSDATE(); +---------------------+---------------------+ | NOW() | SYSDATE() | +---------------------+---------------------+ | 1999-01-01 00:00:00 | 2012-11-29 05:50:03 | +---------------------+---------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
You may proceed to party like it is 1999. How can the NOW() function return a value [...]
When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?
Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | CREATE TABLE foo ( id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, uid INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, update_time DATETIME NOT NULL, .... INDEX `uid` (uid, update_time), INDEX `bar` (some_other_columns) .... ) ENGINE=InnoDB; |
When he ran this query:
1 | SELECT MIN(update_time) FROM foo WHERE update_time IS NOT NULL AND update_time <> '0000-00-00 00:00:00'; |
The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]
Color code your performance numbers
When analyzing how good or bad response time is it is not handy to look at the averages, min or max times – something what is easily computed using built in aggregate functions. We most likely would like to see some percentile numbers – 95 percentile or 99 percentile. The problem is computing these in [...]
MySQL Performance – eliminating ORDER BY function
One of the first rules you would learn about MySQL Performance Optimization is to avoid using functions when comparing constants or order by. Ie use indexed_col=N is good. function(indexed_col)=N is bad because MySQL Typically will be unable to use index on the column even if function is very simple such as arithmetic operation. Same can [...]

