MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

About the Upcoming Examples

For every significant tuning principle in the following chapters, we have provided at least one benchmarked example to illustrate the performance gains that can be obtained. However, you should be aware of the following:

• Any example is just that—an example. Your real-life performance might not show the same improvements that we obtained in our tests, and indeed you might find that some of the techniques shown do not work for you at all. Differences in data volumes and distributions, the MySQL version, and the storage engine you are using—as well as many other factors—might result in significantly different outcomes. Nevertheless, the principles we outline are fairly general-purpose and should work for a wide range of applications and data types.

• All of our examples were done using MySQL 5.0 with either the InnoDB or MyISAM storage engine (with the InnoDB engine being our default). Many of the optimizations involved (index merges, for instance) appeared only in 5.0, and you will certainly see different results if you use a different storage engine such as HEAP or BDB.

• We looked only at "standard" SQL that is common to all of the storage engines. We felt that specialized operations—such as full text search or spatial queries—were beyond the scope of this book, since our intention is to provide a foundation in SQL tuning with respect to stored program development only.

We used a Perl program (MyTrace.pl) to perform our tests. This program can take a normal ...