We’re all familiar with the indexes in books: they help you find specific contents much faster by telling you where they’re located. In a nutshell, database indexes essentially do the same thing—they let you retrieve information from a database much faster by narrowing down the scope of your search. In fact, creating indexes for database tables is one of the most important concepts of database modeling. It’s also often one of the first things you should consider if your query is running too slowly, in which case it may benefit from indexing.

What is MySQL partitioning? What kind of partition types are there? How do you know if this is something your database engine supports? In this article, we tell you what you need to know about partitioning in MySQL. MySQL partitioning is about altering – ideally, optimizing – the way the database engine physically stores data. It allows you to distribute portions of table data (a.k.a. partitions) across the file system based on a set of user-defined rules (a.

In this article, I’ll walk you through some fundamental considerations for working with date- and time-related data in MySQL. We’ll also look at how to handle multiple time zones and daylight saving time changes. Let’s first address some core concepts that will help us understand the underlying complexity of time-related data. It is important to notice that these concepts apply when representing a point in time rather than an absolute duration.

Whenever you need to save datetime data, a question arises about what MySQL type to use. Do you go with a native MySQL DATE type or use an INT field to store date and time info as a plain number? In this article, I’ll explain MySQL’s native options and give you a comparison table of the most common datatypes. We’ll also benchmark some typical queries and reach some conclusions about which datatype to use in a given situation.