May 18, 2013

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

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. [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Percona MySQL Webinar: Really Large Queries: Advanced Optimization Techniques, Feb. 27

Do you have a query you never dared to touch? Do you know it’s bad, but it’s needed? Does it fit your screen? Does it really have to be that expensive? Do you want to do something about it? During the next Percona webinar on February 27, I will present some techniques that can be [...]

Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes

James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]

How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?

One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]

Write contentions on the query cache

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

Optimizing slow web pages with mk-query-digest

I don’t use many tools in my consulting practice but for the ones I do, I try to know them as best as I can. I’ve been using mk-query-digest for almost as long as it exists but it continues to surprise me in ways I couldn’t imagine it would. This time I’d like to share [...]