Data has been an evident part of any organization since time immemorial. It plays a pivotal role in online operations, where functions need timely data access to take place. This makes the enterprise database management system significant for better overall performance without facing any hiccups. But, this performance pressure on the database slowly increases with time.  

As the businesses grow by the passing day, so does their data, that heap on to the database with time. This data becomes massive in volume in time, making the tables bulky with umpteen number of rows over several years. And in turn, for each query, now the database has to process a lot more data over the time as the number of rows increases, affecting the database performance.

This is when your big MySQL database starts to degrade in performance.

Latency seeps in when the data becomes big, no matter what theories say, but practically your big MySQL starts to show the signs of degrading performance. But this clearly does not mean that you cannot maintain the performance of your database, all you would need is a proactive approach and optimization techniques to ensure your database performs optimally even when the data becomes large.

Let us understand how the data bulk impacts the database functioning and degrades its performance to come out with the solutions that could help in restoring the performance of the database.

How does the data bulk impacts database performance over time

Here are a few ways in which the database gets affected as the data grows with time:

• Data volume becomes significantly large. In this case, queries such as SELECT * takes much more time to execute than previously. The data heap makes the query slow with time impacting the performance.

• With time as the grows, so does the redundancy. Redundant tables make duplicate data in the database simply occupying rows without adding any new data to the database. This increases the throughput time, especially when there is a large number of redundant rows, without making any difference to the previous result.

• The database memory might be filled up to alarming capacity where it starts to form bottlenecks in the data access causing slowdowns. This becomes a serious issue after a certain point and one needs to improve the storage capacity to accommodate further incoming data.

Although these issues could cause a serious impact on the database performance, making you experience multiple slowdowns, you can solve these issues efficiently and optimize your database, as discussed in the section below.

How can you maintain the database performance over time

As the data buildup has increased with time, so has the technology that aids better performance. To maintain your MySQL database performance you need professional help from expert database professionals who seamless maintain your database performance over the period of time with their proactive database optimization.

Here are the few database optimization techniques that ensure a high performing database:

• Indexing

It makes several Indexes that lets your queries run faster by decreasing the processing time as it contains keys to different parts of the table making it easier to locate data. Otherwise, the search operation would have run through the entire data in the table, putting a load on the database and degrading its performance.

• Defragmentation of data

With time the data begins to fragment, occupying a larger chunk of the storage space than the actual required. By performing fragmentation, you can improve the storage capacity, by combining similar data together, thereby improving the throughput.

Defragmentation is not only useful in solving the disc capacity crisis but also helps in decreasing the processing time, improving performance.

• Removing Redundant Data

Eliminating redundancies from the database would enhance its performance by improving storage capacity. It removes unnecessary data that gets processed with every query without providing any result, making the database run faster.

• Query Optimization

Optimization of slow queries, can be helpful as it saves processing time significantly, especially in the case of large data volumes. The first step is to identify the slow queries by monitoring the performance closely. Once identified you can find out an easier and more efficient way to perform the given function.

Some of the ways are using temporary tables for complex subqueries, preferring inner joins over outer joins and avoiding unnecessary columns in SELECT statements.

A Step Forward

These query optimization techniques help in maintaining the performance of your database as it drops with time, but what is even more essential is the proactive, strategic use of these techniques. That could happen only by hiring an expert Database Administrator, who has an experience of handling huge databases and optimizing their performance.

If you are looking for a diligent Database Professional who can offer you expert database advice, then you are at the right place. I am Eric Vanier, who has an experience of over a decade working with a vast range of industries including fortune 500 companies in my career as a Database Professional.

Get in touch today, so that we can explore the possibilities of improving your MySQL database performance with the right optimization strategy.