Shell Tips !

Here is a quick picture about the impact of MySQL indexes misuse. At work, our developers made a new release of their search engine using MySQL fulltext indexes, unfortunately they didn’t implement it correctly. The impact was a huge load on all our database servers. To find the trouble, I had to redirect the SQL search flow to a specific server and check for the slow queries then reproduce it with EXPLAIN. Don’t need a long time to find that the search query did an invalid usage of the fulltext index and the “Match / Against” syntax. In fact, the fulltext index was a multiple column fulltext index. As far as I know, it’s the same behavior for any other kind of multiple column index : You have to specify ALL the column present in your index, else index won’t be used by MySQL…