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 [...]
Getting MySQL to use full key length
January 31, 2007 By 5 Comments
There is one bug, or “missing feature” in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet [...]
Covering index and prefix indexes
November 23, 2006 By 5 Comments
I already wrote in the blog as well mentioned in presentation there is often a choice you have to make between having prefix index – which can be significantly smaller in size and having index being covering index, which means query can be executed using only data from the index without reading the row itself. [...]
Using Sphinx as MySQL data retrieval accelerator
October 30, 2006 By 25 Comments
I’ve run into the following thread couple of days ago: Basically someone is using sphinx to perform search simply on attributes (date, group etc) and get sorted result set and claiming it is way faster than getting it with MySQL. Honestly I can well believe it for cases when you want to know number of [...]
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 [...]
Derived Tables and Views Performance
August 31, 2006 By 16 Comments
Starting MySQL 4.1, MySQL had support for what is called derived tables, inline views or basically subselects in the from clause. In MySQL 5.0 support for views was added. These features are quite related to each other but how do they compare in terms of performance ?
MySQL: Followup on UNION for query optimization, Query profiling
August 14, 2006 By 14 Comments
Few days ago I wrote an article about using UNION to implement loose index scan. First I should mention double IN also works same way so you do not have to use the union. So changing query to: mysql> SELECT sql_no_cache name FROM people WHERE age in(18,19,20) AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347); +———————————-+ | name [...]
Using UNION to implement loose index scan in MySQL
August 10, 2006 By 15 Comments
One little known fact about MySQL Indexing, however very important for successfull MySQL Performance Optimization is understanding when exactly MySQL is going to use index and how it is going to do them. So if you have table people with KEY(age,zip) and you will run query something like SELECT name FROM people WHERE age BETWEEN [...]
Extended EXPLAIN
July 24, 2006 By 9 Comments
One nice feature added for EXPLAIN statement in MySQL 4.1 is EXTENDED keyword which provides you with some helpful additional information on query optimization. It should be used together with SHOW WARNINGS to get information about how query looks after transformation as well as what other notes optimizer may wish to tell us. It is [...]
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 [...]
