Understanding Indexing – NY Effective MySQL Meetup

At next week’s NY Effective MySQL Meetup, I will give a talk: “Understanding Indexing: Three rules on making indexes around queries to provide good performance.” The meetup is 7 pm Tuesday, October 11th, and will be held at Hive at 55 (55 Broad Street, New York, NY). Thanks to host Ronald Bradford for the invitation.

Application performance often depends on how fast a query can respond and query performance almost always depends on good indexing. So one of the quickest and least expensive ways to increase application performance is to optimize the indexes. This talk presents three simple and effective rules on how to construct indexes around queries that result in good performance.

This is a general discussion applicable to all databases using indexes and is not specific to any particular MySQL^® storage engine (e.g., InnoDB, TokuDB^®, etc.). The rules are explained using a simple model that does NOT rely on understanding B-trees, Fractal Tree^® indexing, or any other data structure used to store the data on disk.

The rules are derived from these simple properties:

• Point queries are slow
• Range queries are fast

I hope to see you there!