Andrew from Sphinx continues to work on improving SQL (or SphinxQL) support and now he published benchmarks comparing arithmetic expression handling in Sphinx to one in MySQL. The result ? Sphinx scored 3x to 20x faster. Andrew goes to explain results are not 100% comparable (as we can see in the table results are even [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Getting around optimizer limitations with an IN() list
January 9, 2010 By 9 Comments
There was a discussion on LinkedIn one month ago that caught my eye: Database search by “within x number of miles” radius? Anyone out there created a zipcode database and created a “search within x numer of miles” function ? Thankful for any tips you can throw my way.. J A few people commented that [...]
Star Schema Bechmark: InfoBright, InfiniDB and LucidDB
January 7, 2010 By 48 Comments
In my previous rounds with DataWarehouse oriented engines I used single table without joins, and with small (as for DW) datasize (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/). Addressing these issues, I took Star Schema Benchmark, which is TPC-H modification, and tried run queries against InfoBright, InfiniDB, LucidDB and MonetDB. I did not get results for MonetDB, will [...]
Tokyo Tyrant – The Extras Part I : Is it Durable?
November 10, 2009 By 5 Comments
You know how in addition to the main movie you have extras on the DVD. Extra commentary, bloopers, extra scenes, etc? Well welcome the Tyrant extras. With my previous blog posts I was trying to set-up a case for looking at NOSQL tools, and not meant to be a decision making tool. Each solution has [...]
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 [...]
3 ways MySQL uses indexes
September 12, 2009 By 28 Comments
I often see people confuse different ways MySQL can use indexing, getting wrong ideas on what query performance they should expect. There are 3 main ways how MySQL can use the indexes for query execution, which are not mutually exclusive, in fact some queries will use indexes for all 3 purposes listed here.
A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL
August 16, 2009 By 7 Comments
Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
Beware of MySQL Data Truncation
February 7, 2009 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
