Unlike a lot of database servers, MySQL is strangely conservative (by default) on how much memory it will allocate. You can have 16GB of RAM on your machine with MySQL only using 50MBs if you’re not careful, leading to extremely poor performance under heavy load. I know first hand that navigating MySQL configuration [...]

I had an opportunity to do some tuning on postgresql and was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it went.
The first thing I did was try to run an “explain” on the query under discussion.  (Explain is a tabular or graphical view of the detailed steps the database uses to execute your query.  By knowing what [...]

Some of my readers may be aware that nested subqueries such as “SELECT * FROM widgets WHERE id IN (SELECT …)”, don’t work all that well in MYSQL. While the syntax is usually correct, the performance issues in practice can be horrendous. This article delves deeper into this issue, and why MySQL performs [...]

There were a number of comments about my recent article on the negative effects of too much database normalization so allow me to expand the topic a little more. The most consistent comment I saw was that while many of you agreed with me in principle that too much normalization can lead to poor [...]

As someone with a long history in database optimization and who even did their Master’s project on Database normalization, I’m probably the last person in the world to argue against database normalization. From a theoretical standpoint, database normalization is a wonderful thing, helping to organize your data into easy-to-manage and understandable parts. For [...]