Quite typical query for reporting applications is to find top X values. If you analyze Web Site logs you would look at most popular web pages or search engine keywords which bring you most of the traffic. If you’re looking at ecommerce reporting you may be interested in best selling product or top sales people. [...]
To SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS or not to SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS?
When we optimize clients’ SQL queries I pretty often see a queries with SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS option used. Many people think, that it is faster to use this option than run two separate queries: one – to get a result set, another – to count total number of rows. In this post I’ll try to check, is [...]
Sphinx: Going Beyond full text search
I’ve already wrote a few times about various projects using Sphinx with MySQL for scalable Full Text Search applications. For example on BoardReader we’re using this combination to build search against over 1 billion of forum posts totaling over 1.5TB of data handling hundreds of thousands of search queries per day. The count of forum [...]
Is it query which needs to be optimized ?
Last few days I had a lot of a lot of questions at MySQL Performance Forum as well as from our customers regarding query optimization… which had one thing in common – It is not query which needed to be optimized. Way too frequently people design schema first and then think how the queries they [...]
Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.
One interesting problem with MySQL Optimizer I frequently run into is making poor decision when it comes to choosing between using index for ORDER BY or using index for restriction. Consider we’re running web site which sell goods, goods may be from different categories, different sellers different locations which can be filtered on, and there [...]
MySQL Optimizer and Innodb Primary Key
Innodb primary key is special in many senses and I was always wondering how well MySQL is integrated with Innodb to take advantage of these special features. Lets see which things work and which things do not:
Database access Optimization in Web Applications.
This is pretty simple approach I often use called to optimize web application performance if problem happens with few pages. If we have “everything is slow” problem looking at slow query logs may be better start. So what could you do ? Look at the information shown on the page which comes from database. This [...]
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]
MySQL: Followup on UNION for query optimization, Query profiling
Few days ago I wrote an article about using UNION to implement loose index scan. First I should mention double IN also works same way so you do not have to use the union. So changing query to:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | mysql> SELECT sql_no_cache name FROM people WHERE age in(18,19,20) AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347); +----------------------------------+ | name | +----------------------------------+ | ed4481336eb9adca222fd404fa15658e | | 888ba838661aff00bbbce114a2a22423 | +----------------------------------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql> explain SELECT sql_no_cache name FROM people WHERE age in(18,19,20) AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347); +----+-------------+--------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+--------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | people | range | age | age | 4 | NULL | 9 | Using where | +----+-------------+--------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
So as you see there are really different types of ranges in MySQL. IN range allows [...]
MySQL EXPLAIN limits and errors.
Running EXPLAIN for problematic queries is very powerful tool for MySQL Performance optimization. If you’ve been using this tool a lot you probably noticed it is not always provide adequate information. Here is list of things you may wish to watch out. EXPLAIN can be wrong – this does not happen very often but it [...]

