May 21, 2013

MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown

March 14, 2013 By 2 Comments

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

January 15, 2013 By 9 Comments

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Missing Data – rows used to generate result set

July 20, 2008 By 15 Comments

As Baron writes it is not the number of rows returned by the query but number of rows accessed by the query will most likely be defining query performance. Of course not all row accessed are created equal (such as full table scan row accesses may be much faster than random index lookups row accesses [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With:

Quickly preloading Innodb tables in the buffer pool

May 1, 2008 By 9 Comments

In the previous post I mentioned a way I use to preload Clustered Index (data) for Innodb tables. Though I thought this topic would benefit from a bit more information. But lest first start with feature request for Innodb Team: All ways I mention here are hacks and they can’t be as efficient as native [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs Tagged With: ,

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments

Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With: ,

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With:

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With: ,

Descending indexing and loose index scan

May 9, 2006 By 6 Comments

Comments to my previous posts, especially this one by Gokhan inspired me to write a bit about descending indexes and about loose index scan, or what Gokhan calls “better range” support. None of these are actially related to Innodb tables in general – these are features MySQL should get for all storage engines at some [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers Tagged With: , ,