May 22, 2013

MySQL: Data Storage or Data Processing

I was thinking today of how people tend to use MySQL in modern applications and it stroke me in many cases MySQL is not used to process the data, at least not on the large scale – instead it is used for data storage and light duty data retrieval. Even in this case however the [...]

What did we want Interns to do

About one month ago we posted a call for interns to work with us on various MySQL Performance related things. We got good number of replies and a lot of people wondered what tasks exactly we could offer as surely this sort of involvement should be fun and should teach you something.

What would make MySQL Multiple Queries Usable ?

MySQL Has API to run Multiple Queries at once. This feature was designed mainly with saving network round trip in mind and got a little traction due to associated security risks and not significant gains in most cases. What would make MySQL Multiple Queries API more usable ?

Should MySQL Extend GROUP BY Syntax ?

Jan has a good article about finding the row matching some value in the group: This is one illustration of group by limitations in SQL language which is not offset by any MySQL specific extensions,yet As you can see if you want to get one row from the group which is sorted some way you [...]

FaceBook Search, Search for social networks

Yesterday I ran into the article which sheds some light on FaceBook search implementation. As we’re recently a lot into search having implemented a bunch of search projects ourselves and helped number a of customers with their full text search needs I decided to post my thoughts on this matter. First I was surprised article [...]

Sphinx: Going Beyond full text search

I’ve already wrote a few times about various projects using Sphinx with MySQL for scalable Full Text Search applications. For example on BoardReader we’re using this combination to build search against over 1 billion of forum posts totaling over 1.5TB of data handling hundreds of thousands of search queries per day. The count of forum [...]

MySQL net_write_timeout vs wait_timeout and protocol notes

In my previous post I mentioned you might need to increase net_write_timeout to avoid connection being aborted and now I think I should have better explained that. MySQL uses a lot of different timeout variables at different stages. For example when connection is just being established connect_timeout is used. When server waits for another query [...]

Power of MySQL Storage Engines

Where does real power of MySQL Storage Engines, and pluggable storage engines as MySQL 5.1 lays ? It is very much advertised this allows third parties to create their own storage engines and we can see solutions as Solid and PBXT . Plus there is Falcon storage engine being developed inside MySQL. All of these [...]

MySQL Consulting – Being on your own

About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.

Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.

One interesting problem with MySQL Optimizer I frequently run into is making poor decision when it comes to choosing between using index for ORDER BY or using index for restriction. Consider we’re running web site which sell goods, goods may be from different categories, different sellers different locations which can be filtered on, and there [...]