ISV Engineering's Luojia (Jenny) Chen weighs in on the subject of MySQL performance with a new document in the Sun Blueprints™ series titled "Optimizing MySQL™ Database Application Performance with Solaris™ Dynamic Tracing"*. She sets out this summary:
... this Sun BluePrints™ article describes how taking advantage of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) probes can help simplify MySQL database application tuning. Through examples, this document shows some of the specific aspects of MySQL database server operation that can be observed through DTrace probes. ...
DTrace is indeed the "killer tool" available in Solaris & OpenSolaris that allows deep and unobtrusive observation about what is happening during application execution. In this document, she explains and gives examples on how the probes can help answer questions such as:
- Which queries impose the heaviest load and can be targeted for optimization?
- Are any queries executing with enough frequency to generate a sizeable cumulative load?
- How much time is a particular query spending on file sorting?
- Do any stored procedures generate excessive load? If so, which SQL statements are executing within that stored procedure
- Which queries contribute the most to replication lag?
- Can the application take better advantage of cache and how?
* (if you are shy about logging in, you can get it here).
