May 22, 2013

Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]

Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies

Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]

Recall of Percona Server 5.1.47-11.0

Percona Server release 11.0 which we announced few days ago unfortunately was released with a bug introduced while implementing stripping comments in query cache which could cause server crash with certain types of queries if query cache is enabled. We have released Percona Server release 11.1 which includes a fix for this issue. If you [...]

When the subselect runs faster

A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:

This column in the table is looks like this:

The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]

How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?

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.

AUTO_INCREMENT and MERGE TABLES

How would you expect AUTO_INCREMENT to work with MERGE tables ? Assuming INSERT_METHOD=LAST is used I would expect it to work same as in case insertion happens to the last table… which does not seems to be the case. Alternatively I would expect AUTO_INCREMENT to be based off the maximum value across all tables, respecting [...]

Multiple column index vs multiple indexes

After my previous post there were questions raised about Index Merge on Multiple Indexes vs Two Column Index efficiency. I mentioned in most cases when query can use both of the ways using multiple column index would be faster but I also went ahead to do some benchmarks today.

How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?

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 [...]

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 [...]

UNION vs UNION ALL Performance

When I was comparing performance of UNION vs MySQL 5.0 index merge algorithm Sinisa pointed out I should be using UNION ALL instead of simple UNION in my benchmarks, and he was right. Numbers would be different but it should not change general point of having optimization of moving LIMIT inside of union clause being [...]