How to Optimize Your Database Storage in MySQL

SQL (structured query language) is a unique programming language for storing, manipulating, and retrieving data from a database. The language is applied in multiple relational database systems, including Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server, among others. Using SQL statements, developers can handle functional database operations like updating, creating, and deleting data.

With increasing data and technology becoming complex, it is crucial now to optimize MySQL databases to lower your infrastructure costs and deliver the best end-user experience. By optimizing your database storage, professionals will quickly identify bottlenecks, eliminate guessing games, and target insufficient operations by reviewing query execution plans.

Below are a few ways of optimizing your database storage in MySQL.

Profile the server workload

To fully understand how your server works, you should first review its workload. This will reveal the most expensive and slowest queries so you can optimize them. Remember that your most important metric in MySQL is time because you want the completion of a query to be almost instant when issued against your server.

Understand your crucial resources

All databases rely on four crucial resources; CPU, memory, network, and disk. Overwhelming any of these resources will create an inconsistent and weak server that leads to performance lags and issues. It is crucial to choose high-performing resources from the get-go because no amount of optimization of MySQL will make up for bad hardware. When checking the performance of your four resources, distinguish whether they are performing slowly or simply overloaded. This allows you to rectify performance issues quickly.

Use the STaaS model

STaaS (storage as a service) denotes a business model where a service provider will rent you storage resources through a subscription. With this alternative, you only pay for the storage you need when needed. This is an inexpensive option because it negates the capital expenses for new storage equipment and allows upgrading your storage according to your needs. Some of the major cloud storage providers using the STaaS model are Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services.

Do not use MySQL as your queue

Your applications can be infiltrated by queues and access patterns looking like queues without you noticing. For instance, when you establish a status during web development, you might have accidentally created a queue.

A common instance of creating queues is when you mark emails as unsent, then send them and mark them as sent. Queues will keep tasks from running in parallel since workloads are serialized, and they generate tables detailing work in progress. Both issues will slow down your MySQL.

Index all columns in ‘group by,’ ‘where,’ and ‘order by’ clauses

Other than guaranteeing distinct, identifiable records, an index on MySQL allows the server to get faster results from a database. It is crucial when you want to sort your records. In some cases, an index on MySQL takes up a lot of space and might reduce performance on updates, deletes, and inserts. Nonetheless, when you have tables with more than ten rows, an index can reduce the execution time of your query.

When you know what dictates the performance of your database, you can reduce your costs and avoid overprovisioning. Hopefully, you have gathered a few facts on how MySQL works and how best to optimize it from the above article. Though it can be challenging, you can use phpMyAdmin to ease your database’s optimization. This is a free software tool that handles the web-based administration of MySQL.

Remember that optimization is iterative. With data growth and changes in workloads, new optimization opportunities will arise, so it is best to always be prepared for database optimization.

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