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Peter ZaitsevThis is not freshest news ever but I simply have not yet had a time to comment on it. I already wrote about interesting benchmarks Tweakers.net have done for MySQL and PostgreSQL with different CPUs. I was in contact with Tweakers.net team to see if they miss something obvious in MySQL settings as well as […]
As you might noticed there are no recent MySQL Community versions available for download from MySQL Download Area This applies both to binaries (which is expected with new polices) but also to the source files which were promised to be available. So what is if you would like to use recent MySQL code while staying […]
MySQL has two ways to find tune execution of particular query. First is MySQL Hints, such as SQL_BIG_RESULT, STRAIGHT_JOIN, FORCE INDEX etc. You place these directly into the query to change how query is executed for example SELECT STRAIGHT_JOIN * FROM A FORCE INDEX(A) JOIN B The other part is session variable. If you know […]
This topic may look boring and obvious but it is extremely important for MySQL Performance Optimization. In fact I probably have to touch it in every second MySQL Consulting work or even more frequently. IO Bound workload is quite different from CPU bound one, which happens when your working set (normally only fraction of your […]
Today I was working with application which uses Innodb and foreign keys and got into locking problems possibly due to foreign keys, so I did a little investigation on that matter. Interesting enough it looks like most people do not think about foreign keys overhead in terms of locking. The overhead about checking referenced table […]
Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average […]
I guess note number one about MyISAM to Innodb migration is warning what Innodb is very slow in COUNT(*) queries. The part which I often however see omitted is fact it only applies to COUNT(*) queries without WHERE clause. So if you have query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM USER It will be much faster for […]
I had found pile of MySQL and PostgreSQL benchmarks on various platforms which I have not seen before. Very interesting reading. It does not share too much information about how MySQL or PostgreSQL was configured or about queries. Furthermore MySQL and PostgreSQL has a bit different implementations (ie SubQueries avoided for MySQL) so do not […]
One may have notice we were not blogging too much recently, this is because we were quite busy, mainly building BoardReader.com – Search Engine which indexes tens of thousands of forums from all over the world. This project was built by us as consulting project so too bad we do not own it completely but […]
In the past life was easy in MySQL. Both CHAR and VARCHAR types meant the same, only being difference in the sense of fixed or dynamic row length used. Trailing spaces were removed in both cases. With MySQL 5.0 however things changed so now VARCHAR keeps trailing spaces while CHAR columns do not any more. […]
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. […]
I was restarting MySQL on box with 50.000 of Innodb tables and again it took couple of hours to reach decent performance because of “Opening Tables” stage was taking long. Part of the problem is Innodb is updating stats on each table open which is possibly expensive operation, but really it is only great test […]
In query examinations it is often interesting which columns query needs to access to provide result set as it gives you ideas if you can use covering indexes to speed things up or even cache some data by denormalizing tables. So far it has to be done manually – look at SELECT clause, WHERE clause, […]
Running RPM based or other packaged MySQL Binary you may have a problem if you would like to rebuild binary for some reason – change some build settings, apply some third party patches or simply try latest snapshot (This time I was both applying patches for Innodb scalability and Vadim’s patches to get proper slow […]
Today I noticed one of server used for web request profiling stats logging is taking about 2GB per day for logs, which are written in MyISAM table without indexes. So I thought it is great to try how much archive storage engine could help me in this case.
As you probably know PHP “mysql” extension supported persistent connections but they were disabled in new “mysqli” extension, which is probably one of the reasons some people delay migration to this extension. The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster […]
One think I can see with people using EXPLAIN is trusting it too much, ie assuming if number of rows is reported by EXPLAIN is large query must be inefficient. It may not be the case. The question is not only about stats which may be wrong and which is why you may want to […]
As you can read from my Innodb Architecture and Performance Optimization presentation Innodb automatically manages undo area in system tablespace so you never need to care about it. I present it as positive feature reducing administration effort needed but it also can cause a troubles as it happened for me today: InnoDB: 11 transaction(s) which […]
I’m just back from OpenSource Database Conference and PHP International Conference which took place in Frankfurt. I’ve uploaded slides for two talks I’ve been giving which you might want to check out. In general Database portion of the conference was a bit boring. May be because it was not widely announced or may be for […]
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 […]