I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
How to Identify Bad Queries in MySQL
Finding bad queries is a big part of optimization. A scientific optimization process can be simplified to “can anything be improved for less than it costs not to improve it? – if not, we’re done.” In databases, we care most about the work the database is doing. That is, queries. There are other things we [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.
Using flow control functions for performance monitoring queries
I’m not big fan on flow control functions like IF or CASE used in MySQL Queries as they are often abused used to create queries which are poorly readable as well as can hardly be optimized well by MySQL Optimizer. One way I find IF statement very useful is computing multiple aggregates over different set [...]
Database problems in MySQL/PHP Applications
Article about database design problems is being discussed by Kristian. Both article itself and responce cause mixed feellings so I decided it is worth commenting: 1. Using mysql_* functions directly This is probably bad but I do not like solutions proposed by original article ether. PEAR is slow as well as other complex conectors. I [...]

