Introduction In this article, we are going to see what a Clustered Index is and why it’s very important to understand how tables are organized when using a relational database system. B+ Tree The most common index used in a relational database system is the B+ Tree one. Like the B-Tree index, the B+ Tree is a self-balanced ordered tree data structure. Both the B-Tree and the B-Tree start from a Root node and may have Internal Nodes and Leaf Nodes. However, unlike the B-Tree, the B+ Tree stores all the keys... Read More

The post Clustered Index appeared first on Vlad Mihalcea.

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 …

What's a good natural key? This is a very difficult question for most entities when you design your schema. In some rare cases, there seems to be an "obvious" candidate, such as a variety of ISO standards, including: ISO 639 language codesISO 3166 country codesISO 4217 currency codes But even in those cases, there might … Continue reading The Cost of Useless Surrogate Keys in Relationship Tables →

I ran into an interesting issue today, while examining some EXPLAIN outputs, and wanted to share the findings, as some of this is undocumented.

Basically, you can start with a very simple InnoDB table - 2 INT columns, Primary Key (PK) on the 1st column, regular index on the 2nd:

CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `id2` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id1`),
  KEY `id2` (`id2`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

The query is:

SELECT id1 FROM t1;

This is a straight-forward query with no WHERE clause.

read more

I ran into an interesting issue today, while examining some EXPLAIN outputs, and wanted to share the findings, as some of this is undocumented.

Basically, you can start with a very simple InnoDB table – 2 INT columns, Primary Key (PK) on the 1st column, regular index on the 2nd:

CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `id2` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id1`),
  KEY `id2` (`id2`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

The query is:

SELECT id1 FROM t1;

This is a straight-forward query with no WHERE clause.

Given no WHERE clause, we know there will be a full table or index scan. Let’s look at EXPLAIN:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT id1 FROM t1\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: t1
         type: index
possible_keys: NULL
          key: id2
      key_len: 5
          ref: NULL
         rows: 1 …

I spent Friday examining the systems for a more traditional consulting gig (in case you did not know, Pythian has offered more traditional consulting and emergency services in addition to our remote DBA offering for our entire 12 year history). It is a familiar story to many people — the database performance was unacceptable.

The company had a few log tables that had huge amounts of inserts and foreign keys, so they used InnoDB. Unfortunately, they also used a GUID as a primary key (which is getting more and more common these days, but long primary keys with InnoDB slow down INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE commands a great deal) — varchar(32) and utf8.

That’s right — their primary key for many of these tables was 96 bytes long (32 characters * 3 bytes per character), and as an InnoDB table, the primary key is clustered with …