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 [...]
Using GROUP BY WITH ROLLUP for Reporting Performance Optimization
September 17, 2007 By 14 Comments
Quite typical query for reporting applications is to find top X values. If you analyze Web Site logs you would look at most popular web pages or search engine keywords which bring you most of the traffic. If you’re looking at ecommerce reporting you may be interested in best selling product or top sales people. [...]
PHP Large result sets and summary tables.
July 6, 2007 By 8 Comments
We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security. One of the process web [...]
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 [...]
Using MyISAM in production
June 17, 2006 By 36 Comments
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
