Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
April 4, 2011 By 20 Comments
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
February 12, 2009 By 17 Comments
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.
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
August 1, 2008 By 12 Comments
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Multi-Column IN clause – Unexpected MySQL Issue
April 4, 2008 By 21 Comments
We have an application which stores massive amount of urls. To save on indexes instead of using URL we index CRC32 of the URL which allows to find matching urls quickly. There is a bit of chance there would be some false positives but these are filtered out after reading the data so it works [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
October 12, 2007 By 10 Comments
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
Falcon Storage Engine Design Review
January 12, 2007 By 19 Comments
Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]
Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables
October 3, 2006 By 8 Comments
I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]
Why Index could refuse to work ?
September 8, 2006 By 15 Comments
Have you ever seen index which refused to be used even if there is every reason for it to work (from the glance view):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> explain select * from article where article_id=10; +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | article | ALL | PRIMARY | NULL | NULL | NULL | 93490 | Using where | +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
Why on the earth index would not be used you would think, even if MySQL is mentioning it in “possible keys” ? Should you try to force it ?
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
September 1, 2006 By 100 Comments
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 [...]
