A common MySQL strategy to perform updates with accumulating functions is to employ user-defined variables, using the UPDATE [...] SET mycol = (@myvar := EXPRESSION(@myvar, mycol)) pattern.

This pattern though doesn’t play well with the optimizer (leading to non-deterministic behavior), so it has been deprecated. This left a sort of void, since the (relatively) sophisticated logic is now harder to reproduce, at least with the same simplicity.

In this article, I’ll have a look at two ways to apply such logic: using, canonically, window functions, and, a bit more creatively, using recursive CTEs.

• Requirements and background
• …

Another interesting feature released with MySQL 8.0 is full support for functional indexes.

Although this is not a strictly new concept in the MySQL world (indexed generated columns provided the same functionality), I find it worth reviewing, through some applications, notes and considerations.

All in all, I’m not 100% bought into functional indexes (as opposed to indexed generated columns); I’ll elaborate on this over the course of the article.

As a natural fit, generated columns are included in the article; additionally, some constructs build on my previous article, in relation to the subject of CTEs.

Updated on 12/Mar/2020: Found another bug.

Contents:

• …

By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

We call this approach a ‘Rolling Index Creation’ - if you have a MySQL master-slave replica set, you can create the index one node at a time in a rolling fashion. You should create the index only on the slave nodes so the master’s …

Optimal Indexing for Performance – How to plan Index Ops. ? 

An index or database index is a data structure which is used to quickly locate and access the data in a database table. Indexes are created on columns which will be the Search key that contains a copy of the primary key or candidate key of the table. These values are stored in sorted order so that the corresponding data can be accessed quickly (Note that the data may or may not be stored in sorted order). They are also Data Reference Pointers holding the address of the disk block where that particular key value can be found. Indexing in database systems is similar to what we see in books. There are complex design trade-offs involving lookup performance, index size, and index-update performance. Many index designs exhibit logarithmic (O(log(N))) lookup performance and in some applications it is possible to achieve flat (O(1)) performance. Indices can …

In this blog post, I’ll look into four ways MySQL executes GROUP BY. 

In my previous blog post, we learned that indexes or other means of finding data might not be the most expensive part of query execution. For example, MySQL GROUP BY could potentially be responsible for 90% or more of the query execution time. 

The main complexity when MySQL executes GROUP BY is computing aggregate functions in a GROUP BY statement. How this works is shown in the documentation for UDF Aggregate Functions. As we see, the requirement is that UDF functions get all values that constitute the single group one …

In this blog post, I’ll look at whether optimizing indexing is always the key to improving MySQL query performance (spoiler, it isn’t).

As we look at MySQL query performance, our first concern is often whether a query is using the right indexes to retrieve the data. This is based on the assumption that finding the data is the most expensive operation – and the one you should focus on for MySQL query optimization. However, this is not always the case.

Let’s look at this query for illustration:

mysql> show create table tbl G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
      Table: tbl
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `tbl` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `k` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
 `g` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
 KEY `k_1` (`k`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB …

Join Percona’s Senior Architect, Matthew Boehm, as he presents What You Need to Get the Most Out of Indexes – Part 2 webinar on Thursday, October 19, 2017, at 11:00 am PDT / 2:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Proper indexing is key to database performance. Finely tune your query writing and database performance with tips from the experts. MySQL offers a few different types of indexes and uses them in a variety of ways.

In this session you’ll learn:

• How to use composite indexes
• Other index usages besides lookup
• How to find …

Notes/errata/updates for Chapter 6:
See the official book errata at http://tahaghoghi.com/LearningMySQL/errata.php – Chapter 6 includes pages 179 – 222.

Other notes:
At the end of the “Creating Tables” section (p.183-4), it says “We like using the underscore character to separate words, but that’s just a matter of style and taste; you could use underscores or dashes, or omit the word-separating formatting altogether.” While this is true, beware of using a dash, because MySQL will try to interpret “two-words”, thinking – is a minus sign. I recommend avoiding dashes for this reason (even though the book does this on page 215).

At the end of the “Collation and Character Sets” section (p.186), it says “When you’re creating a database, you can set the default character set and sort order for the database and its …

We all know that if we add a MySQL index to speed up a read, we end up making writes slower. How often do we do the analysis to look at how much more work is done?

Recently, a developer came to me and wanted to add an index to a very large table (hundreds of gigabytes) to speed up a query. We did some testing on a moderately used server:

Set long_query_time to 0 and turn slow query logging on
Turn slow query logging off after 30 minutes.

Add the index (was on a single field)

Repeat the slow query logging for 30 minutes at a similar time frame (in our case, we did middle of the day usage on a Tuesday and Wednesday, when the database is heavily used).

Then I looked at the write analysis – there were no DELETEs, no UPDATEs that updated the indexed field, and no UPDATEs that used the indexed field in the filtering. There were only INSERTs, and with the help of pt-query-digest, here’s what I found: …

Join Percona’s Senior Architect, Matthew Boehm, as he presents Indexes – What You Need to Know to Get the Most Out of Them on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 at 8:00 am PDT / 11:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Proper indexing is key to database performance. Find out how MySQL uses indexes for query execution, and then how to come up with an optimal index strategy. In this session, you’ll also learn how to know when you need an index, and also how to get rid of indexes that you don’t need to speed up queries.

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