Here is nice gotcha which I’ve seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons. Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
MySQL VIEW as performance troublemaker
August 12, 2007 By 55 Comments
I start to see applications being built utilizing VIEWs functionality which appeared in MySQL 5.0 and quite frequently VIEWs are used to help in writing the queries – to keep queries simple without really thinking how it affects server performance. Even worse than that – looking at the short table which just gets single row [...]
Using index for ORDER BY vs restricting number of rows.
February 16, 2007 By 8 Comments
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 [...]
Getting MySQL to use full key length
January 31, 2007 By 5 Comments
There is one bug, or “missing feature” in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet [...]
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 [...]
MySQL EXPLAIN limits and errors.
July 24, 2006 By 6 Comments
Running EXPLAIN for problematic queries is very powerful tool for MySQL Performance optimization. If you’ve been using this tool a lot you probably noticed it is not always provide adequate information. Here is list of things you may wish to watch out. EXPLAIN can be wrong – this does not happen very often but it [...]
