Query caching is one of the prominent features in MySQL and a vital part of query optimization. It is important to know how it works as it has the potential to cause significant performance improvements – or a slowdown – of your workload.

The MySQL query cache is a global one shared among the sessions. It caches the select query along with the result set, which enables the identical selects to execute faster as the data fetches from the in memory. It is important to have everything identical, no new comments, spaces, or most significantly differences in the WHERE clause. Basically when you trigger a select query, if it is available in the cache; it fetches from there or it considers the query as a new one and will go to the parser.

Even though it has some nice advantages, the MySQL query cache has its own downsides too. Well, let’s think about this: If you are frequently updating the table, you are then invalidating …

I will be presenting two webinars in August:

• Aug 6, 10 a.m. PDT: Advanced Query Tuning in MySQL 5.6 and Beyond
• Aug 13, 10 a.m. PDT:  Using Performance Schema to Monitor and Troubleshoot MySQL 5.6

This Wednesday’s webinar on advanced MySQL query tuning will be focused on tuning the “usual suspects”: queries with “Group By”, “Order By” and subqueries; those query types are usually perform bad in MySQL and add an additional load as MySQL may need to create a temporary table(s) or perform a filesort. New this year: I will talk more about new MySQL …

Over the past few years, we’ve seen MySQL technology advance in leaps and bounds, especially when it comes to scalability. But by focusing on the internals of the storage engine for so long, MySQL has fallen behind regarding support for advanced SQL features.

SQLite, another popular open-source SQL database, just released version 3.8.3, including support for recursive SQL queries using the WITH RECURSIVE syntax, in compliance with SQL:1999.

Why is this significant? It means that MySQL is now the only widely-used SQL implementation that does not support recursive queries. Fifteen years after it was defined in the SQL standard, almost every other SQL database of note has supported this feature:

• …

MySQL and Scaling-up (using more powerful hardware) was always a hot topic. Originally MySQL did not scale well with multiple CPUs; there were times when InnoDB performed poorer with more  CPU cores than with less CPU cores. MySQL 5.6 can scale significantly better; however there is still 1 big limitation: 1 SQL query will eventually use only 1 CPU core (no parallelism). Here is what I mean by that: let’s say we have a complex query which will need to scan million of rows and may need to create a temporary table; in this case MySQL will not be able to scan the table in multiple threads (even with partitioning) so the single query will not be faster on the more powerful server. On the contrary, a server with more slower CPUs will show worse performance than the server with less (but faster) CPUs.

To address this issue we can use a parallel …

Thanks to all who attended my “MySQL Query Tuning” webinar on July 24.  If you missed it, you can you can download the slides and also watch the recorded video. Thank you for the excellent questions after the webinar as well. Query tuning is a big topic and, due to the limited time, I had to skip some material, especially some of the monitoring. I would like, however, to answer all the questions I did not get into during the webinar session.

Q: Did you reset the query cache before doing your benchmark on your query? 0.00 seconds sounds too good 

A: (This is in response to a …

It is time for the Query Tuning Webinar again! This year I will be delivering the Webinar on July 24 at 10 a.m. PDT, Advanced MySQL Query Tuning, hosted by Percona. I have included some new topics about loose and tight index scan and will also show some real world examples and solutions for MySQL query optimizations.

You can register for the Webinar here. It will also be recorded, so if you can’t make it on July 24, 10am you can always watch it later.

On July 24 at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a Webinar on Advanced MySQL Query Tuning. I will focus on optimizing the common slow queries with group by and order by. Those queries usually create temporary tables and perform a “filesort” operation. I will show how to optimize those queries so that they will be running significantly faster, which will increase the application performance and decrease MySQL load.

I presented a similar topic in April at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. This webinar, however, will be more advanced and will also cover some additional topics like “loose and …

Join 8000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. In the past two years we’ve written a ton of material on scalability. Here’s the greatest hits… Why Generalists Are Better at Scaling the Web The internet stack is a complex infrastructure of interlocking components. An scalability engineer must be adept at Linux, plus webservers, […]

The post Scalability Tips & Greatest Hits appeared first on Scalable Startups.

Join 7500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

There’s a lot of talk on the web about scalability. Making web applications scale is not easy. The modern web architecture has so many moving parts. How can we grapple with the underlying problem?

Also: Why Are MySQL DBAs So Hard to Find?

The LAMP stack scales well

The truth that is half right. True there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot to setup. The internet stack made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. LAMP as it’s called, was built to be resilient, dynamic, and scalable. It’s essentially why Amazon works. Why what they’re doing is possible. Windows …

Join 6100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. There are two ways to speedup UNIONs in a MySQL database. First use UNION ALL if at all possible, and second try to push down your conditions. [mytweetlinks] 1. UNION ALL is much faster than UNION How does a UNION work? Imagine you have two [...]