Query Optimization5 min read
MySQL Query Optimization: Real Lessons from a 36GB Index Disaster
What happens when your index outgrows your data — and how we fixed it without downtime in production.
Writing
39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
7 articles matching “Query Optimization”
Query Optimization13 min read
Page 1 Loads in 8ms, Page 5,000 Takes 4 Seconds — The OFFSET Trap and How Cursors Fix It
Every list endpoint ends in LIMIT 20 OFFSET ?. It has an index, page one returns in 8ms, and it passes review — then one Tuesday page 4,000 takes four seconds and a nightly export job stops finishing.
Query Optimization13 min read
“The Money Was There When I Checked” — Transaction Isolation Levels and the Bugs Each One Lets Through
“We sold 3 tickets but only had 1.” The code is inside a transaction, looks right, works a hundred times locally, and only breaks in production under load.
Query Optimization15 min read
The Data Structure That Lies to Save Your Disk — How Bloom Filters Say "Definitely Not Here" in 1% of the Space
We're trained to demand our data structures be correct — so here's one that's wrong on purpose, and runs inside Cassandra, RocksDB, Bigtable, most CDNs, and your browser's malware check.
Query Optimization18 min read
"Push It All on the Database" — The Lie That Works Until It Doesn't
Every team ships with the same lie: throw everything on the database and it'll handle correctness. Works at 50 writes/sec.
Query Optimization18 min read
Why Your Indexes Aren't Working: Non-SARGable Queries Explained
A deep-dive into non-SARGable SQL with B-tree diagrams, real EXPLAIN output, and the exact rewrites — told through a gaming dashboard that went from 4,200ms to 2ms without touching the schema.
Query Optimization13 min read
Vector Search Explained: From KNN to HNSW — A Complete Guide
How similarity search works under the hood — and why naive brute-force collapses at scale.