The talk I gave at the Percona Performance Conference at the MySQL
Users Conference in April 2009 can be found here.
This talk provides some examples where covering indexes help, and
then describes a performance model that can be used to understand and
predict query performance. It covers clustering indexes (which are a
kind of “universal” covering index), and describes the asymptotic
performance of Fractal Tree indexing (but sorry, it doesn’t yet
explain how Fractal Tree indexes work.) We’re working on writing a
white paper to explain how they work, but we’ve simply been too
busy. The talk concludes with the graph (shown above) that
illustrates iiBench performance on RAID and SSD using TokuDB and
InnoDB.
