So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
January 23, 2013 By 4 Comments
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Economics of Performance Optimization
March 13, 2008 By 9 Comments
I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
To SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS or not to SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS?
August 28, 2007 By 57 Comments
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 [...]
How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables
August 16, 2007 By 26 Comments
As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]
Getting MySQL to use full key length
January 31, 2007 By 5 Comments
There is one bug, or “missing feature” in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet [...]
Getting real life query speeds with MySQL
January 10, 2007 By 10 Comments
To check for query performance improvements followed indexing/query changes or MySQL configuration changes our customers often decide to run the query and see if there is any significant improvement. Leaving aside question of checking single query alone might not be the best way to see real improvement for your application, the problem they usually run [...]
