Author: Robert Agar

Tuning database performance is a complicated task that can be a thorn in the side of the database team. There are many interconnected components and environmental aspects that come under consideration when attempting to optimize the performance of your database systems. A DBA can be hard-pressed to determine where to begin their optimization efforts.

An initial investigation may concentrate on the network and hardware on which the database is running. These inquiries may uncover issues that can be easily identified and addressed. It may be a simple matter of adding some disk space or upgrading memory on the database’s server. You might be able to move the database to a less-used network segment to improve the response time when satisfying user requests. Maybe there are conflicting applications or processes on the same server that are impacting the availability of resources to power the …

Query profiling is a useful technique for analyzing the overall performance of a database. Considering that a single mid-to-large sized application can execute numerous queries each and every second, query profiling is an important part of database tuning, both as a proactive measure and in diagnosing problems.  In fact, it can become difficult to determine the exact sources and causes of bottlenecks and sluggish performance without employing some sort of query profiling techniques. This blog will present a few useful query profiling techniques that exploit MariaDB server’s own built-in tools: the Slow Query Log and the Performance Schema.

MariaDB vs. MySQL

Needless to say, the techniques that we’ll be covering here today are likely to be equally applicable to MySQL, due to the close relationship between the two products.

The day that Oracle announced the purchase of Sun back in 2010, Michael “Monty” Widenius …

When I have discovered MySQL User-defined variables at the first time, I didn’t pay much attention to them and didn’t realize their strength. At first, one can think that they are just one of the many unnoticed MySQL features. Well, I was wrong. Here, I will try to summarize their strength, though I think there is […]