In this blog post, my colleague Jørgen Løland described a new feature of MySQL 5.6: Optimizer Tracing. I recommend reading his article, as it presents this new feature in a simple, easy-to-read manner.
The Optimizer Tracing feature can help understanding what the Optimizer is doing; it is available since milestone 5.6.3, announced October 3rd at Oracle Open World (here is the changelog). It's good to see it mature now; I remember that Sergey Petrunia did the first prototype back in March 2009!
Today I will be giving some must-have tips related to handling big traces.
First thing to know, a trace lives in main memory (internally it is allocated on [Read more...]