May 21, 2013

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see

February 12, 2013 By 4 Comments

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference! When picking talks to attend, [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, MySQL, Percona Live Tagged With: , ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

January 16, 2013 By 6 Comments

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

January 15, 2013 By 9 Comments

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

August 24, 2012 By 5 Comments

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Webinar for Full Text Search Throwdown

August 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

Tomorrow, August 22 at 10:00am PDT, I’ll present a webinar called Full Text Search Throwdown.  This is a no-nonsense performance comparison of solutions for full text indexing for MySQL applications, including: LIKE predicates and regular expressions MyISAM FULLTEXT indexes InnoDB FULLTEXT indexes Apache Solr Sphinx Search Trigraphs I’ll compare the performance for building indexes and querying [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

UDF -vs- MySQL Stored Function

September 6, 2010 By 8 Comments

Few days ago I was working on a case where we needed to modify a lot of data before pushing it to sphinx – MySQL did not have a function to do the thing so I thought I’ll write MySQL Stored Function and we’ll be good to go. It worked! But not so well really [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , ,

When should you store serialized objects in the database?

January 21, 2010 By 47 Comments

A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With:
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