Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide [...]
Data mart or data warehouse?
This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis. Part 1 – Intro to OLAP Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post) Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries. [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
Unused indexes by single query
Usually unused indexes are devil, they waste diskspace, cache, they make INSERT / DELETE / UPDATE operations slower and what makes them worse – it is hard to find them. But now ( with userstatsV2.patch) you can find all unused indexes (since last restart of mysqld) by single query
1 2 3 4 5 6 | SELECT DISTINCT s.TABLE_SCHEMA, s.TABLE_NAME, s.INDEX_NAME FROM information_schema.statistics `s` LEFT JOIN information_schema.index_statistics INDXS ON (s.TABLE_SCHEMA = INDXS.TABLE_SCHEMA AND s.TABLE_NAME=INDXS.TABLE_NAME AND s.INDEX_NAME=INDXS.INDEX_NAME) WHERE INDXS.TABLE_SCHEMA IS NULL; |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | +--------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ | TABLE_SCHEMA | TABLE_NAME | INDEX_NAME | +--------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ | art100 | article100 | ext_key | | art100 | article100 | site_id | | art100 | article100 | hash | | art100 | article100 | forum_id_2 | | art100 | article100 | published | | art100 | article100 | inserted | | art100 | article100 | site_id_2 | | art100 | author100 | PRIMARY | | art100 | author100 | site_id | ... +--------------+---------------------------+-----------------+ 1150 rows in set (1 min 44.23 sec) |
As you see query [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
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 [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
Watch out for Marketing benchmarks
Whenever I see benchmark results I try to understand if it is technical benchmark – made by people seeking the truth or it is done by Marketing department to wash your brains. Watch out. Whenever you treat marketing benchmarks as technical ones, you make make wrong decision. Take a look at MySQL 5.0 Benchmarks Whitepaper [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]
Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?
If you’ve been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions [...]

