At the end of my talk “Troubleshooting MySQL Performance” at the LinuxPiter conference, a user asked me a question: “What does the EXPLAIN ‘filtered’ field mean, and how do I use it?” I explained that this is the percentage of rows that were actually needed, against the equal or bigger number of resolved rows. While the user was happy with the answer, I’d like to better illustrate this. And I can do it with help of EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON and its

rows_examined_per_scan, rows_produced_per_join

  statistics.

Let’s take a simple query that searches information about the …

When you work with complicated queries, especially ones which contain subqueries, it is easy to make a typo or misinterpret column name. While in many cases you will receive a 

column not found

 error, sometimes you can get strange results instead.

Like finding 4079 countries in Antarctica:

mysql> select count(*) from City where CountryCode in (select CountryCode from Country where Continent = 'Antarctica');
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|     4079 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.05 sec)

Or not finding any cities in Georgia:

mysql> select Name, Language from City join CountryLanguage using (CountryCode) where CountryCode in (select Code from Country where District='Georgia' and Continent='Asia');
Empty set (0.18 sec)

I used a standard …

When a new version of MySQL is about to be released we read a lot of blog posts about the performance and scalability improvements. That’s good but sometimes we miss some small features that can help us a lot in our day-to-day tasks. One good example is the blog post that Aurimas wrote about a new small feature in MySQL 5.6 that I didn’t know about until I read it: the Automatic InnoDB transaction log file size change. How cool is that?

I plan to write a series of blog posts that will show some of those small new features in MySQL 5.7 that are going to be really useful. I’m going to start with EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION.

This feature allows us to run an EXPLAIN for an already running statement. Let’s say that you find a query …

I thought it was worth a moment to reiterate on the new Performance Schema related defaults that MySQL 5.7.7 brings to the table, for various reasons.

For one, most of you might have noticed that profiling was marked as deprecated in MySQL 5.6.7. So it is expected that you invest into learning more about Performance Schema (and Mark’s sys schema!).

Second, there are lots of virtual environments and appliances out there running Community Edition MySQL where Performance Schema can be a useful tool for analyzing performance. Thus, expect to see more articles about using PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA and SYS_SCHEMA from us!

Third, we have more and more junior readers who might benefit from light reads such as this.

The new defaults that I wanted to highlight are mentioned in the …

In version MySQL 5.7.7 Oracle presented a new promising feature: optimizer hints. However it did not publish any documentation about the hints. The only note which I found in the user manual about the hints is:

• It is now possible to provide hints to the optimizer by including /*+ ... */ comments following the SELECT, INSERT, REPLACE, …

The slides for my Improving Performance With Better Indexes presentation at Percona Live 2015 MySQL Conference and Expo are now available.

In this presentation I discuss how to identify, review and analyze SQL statements in order to create better indexes for your queries. This includes understanding the EXPLAIN syntax and how to create and identify covering and partial column indexes.

Download PDF Presentation

This presentation is based on the work with a customer showing the 95% improvement of a key 15 table join query running 15,000 QPS in a 25 billion SQL statements per day …

While we always want better performance and more and larger features for MySQL, those cannot just “magically appear” from one version to another, requiring deep architecture changes and lots of lines of code. However, there are sometimes smaller features and fixes that could be implemented by an intern or an external contributor, mainly at SQL layer, and that could make the MySQL ecosystem friendlier to newbies and non-experts. Making a piece of software easier to use is sometimes overlooked, but it is incredibly important -not everybody using MySQL is a DBA, and the more people adopting it, more people will be able to live from it, both upstream and as third party providers.

Here it is my own personal list of fixes for EXPLAIN messages. If you are an experienced MySQL user you are probably aware of their meaning, but that doesn’t solve the problem for beginners. The reason why I am writing a blog post is to gather …

TL;DR: Priority queue optimization for filesort with small LIMIT is now visible in MariaDB: there is a status variable and you can also see it in the slow query log (KB page link).

A longer variant:
One of the new optimizations in MySQL 5.6 is ability to use a priority queue instead of sorting for ORDER BY … LIMIT queries. The optimization was ported into MariaDB 10.0 long ago, but we still get questions if/when it will be ported. I guess, the reason for this is that, besides the query speed, you can’t see this optimization. Neither EXPLAIN, nor EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON or PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA or status variables give any indication whether filesort used priority queue or the regular quicksort+merge algorithm.

MySQL 5.6 has only one way one can …

Last week, yours truly has pushed a new feature into MariaDB 10.1 tree: ANALYZE statement.

The idea of this feature is to make it easy to compare query plan with query execution. ANALYZE statement will run the statement, and produce EXPLAIN-like output, where optimizer’s estimates are followed by numbers that were observed when running the query. The output looks like this:

Here,

• Next to rows there is r_rows column which shows how many records were read from the table.
• Next to filtered there is r_filtered column which shows which fraction of records was left after the part of the WHERE condition attached to the table was checked.

I think this should explain the feature. If you want more details, please refer to the KB article …

MySQL 5.6 has added support for EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON. The basic use case for that feature is that one can look at the JSON output and see more details about the query plan. More advanced/specific use cases are difficult, though. The problem is, you can’t predict what EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON will produce. There is no documentation or any kind of convention regarding the contents of JSON document that you will get.

To make sure I’m not missing something, I looked at MySQL Workbench. MySQL Workbench has a feature called Visual Explain. If you want to use, prepare to seeing this a lot:

In Workbench 6.1.4 you get it for (almost?) any query with subquery. In Workbench 6.1.6 (released last week), some subqueries work, but it’s still easy to hit a query whose EXPLAIN JSON output confuses workbench.

Looking at the source code, this seems to be just the start of …