Expert Tips for Maximizing MYSQL Performance

Increasingly, database operations are becoming the bottleneck of the entire application, especially noticeable in web applications. Database performance is not just a concern for DBAs but also for programmers.

When designing database structures and performing database operations (especially querying), we need to pay attention to performance. I hope the following optimization techniques will be helpful to you.

Optimize Your Queries for Query Cache

Most MySQL servers have query caching enabled. This is one of the most effective methods for improving performance, and it’s handled by MySQL’s database engine. When the same queries are executed multiple times, their results are stored in a cache. This allows subsequent identical queries to access the cached results without needing to access the tables directly.

The main issue here is that this aspect is often overlooked by programmers. Certain query statements can prevent MySQL from utilizing the cache. Take a look at the example below:

// WIthout query cache
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= CURDATE()");

// With query cache
$today = date("Y-m-d");
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= '$today'");