What I learned recently though is that using functions such as YEAR(), MONTH(), and DAY() defeat the use of indexes and primary keys most of the time. Because these functions have to be performed on the date value, each record in the table is usually processed. This slows the query down greatly and causes a lot of needless computation to result.

What I found was the BETWEEN option in MySQL. Using this allows the query optimizer to utilize indexes fully, and eliminates the need for many date computations which can be expensive.

An added benefit I found was how to handle the beginning and end dates for my queries. Instead of calculating what the end date was, I could use the INTERVAL term and let MySQL figure it out for me. This also allowed me to use the same query for my monthly, quarterly, and yearly time ranges very simply. All I had to do was take the date and the interval such as the 3 examples below.

    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 1 MONTH
    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 3 MONTH
    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 1 YEAR

In this way I didn't have to do any extra work in my application, and I was assured that MySQL would choose records in the correct date range and take advantage of my indexes and primary keys. In this case, trying to do some performance improvements taught me a better way to write my SQL and resulted in less code which was easier to understand.

As you can see, modifying the query with the right amount of time is quite trivial. I have dropdown values in the SELECT on my web pages and all I have to do is append "-01" and then append the interval the user has chosen. Its great when code can be made simpler and more powerful at the same time.

Waiting another 2 years to get features that are in Scala today seems like a waste of time. Sure, there are many developers who can wait since they are still working on projects with JDK 4 or 5. These shops will be ready for the new features when they are good and ready. The rest of us want the new JDK now though, and it looks like the wait is going to be even longer.

I have not looked at Scala before now, but I’m going to. My development work is still in JDK 6 for the Android platform. I don’t see that changing in the near future, but as far as languages go, Scala seems to have the mind power behind it to make it. The other languages I have looked at such as Groovy, JRuby, et. al. are nice, but it appears that momentum is behind Scala and so that is where I’m going to be focusing my learning. I just hope that JDK 7 comes out sooner than later.

You can never have too much of a good thing!

Running tests usually takes a lot of time and effort. There is planning, setup, executing the test, capturing data, and then processing that data. Having to rerun a test just to get some data that wasn’t captured before is a lot of work. That is why capturing everything up front can save a lot of time and aggravation.

A word of caution though. Watch the disk space while capturing. Make sure the drive won’t be filled with performance data. That could cause the test to fail and cause you to start all over again. Worse, parts of the system could become corrupted and require a complete reinstall and setup of the test.

So what do I monitor? Everything!

When using typeperf, nmon, JMX, database metric snapshots, or anything else; I try to capture much more than I need, but not so much so that I am capturing every piece of data possible. With typeperf, you can literally collect over 2000 different metrics. When pulling data from metric collection of a database, there can be hundreds of data points. Metrics about table spaces, buffer pools, resources, even down to the individual query.

Later I’ll discuss how I process this huge amount of data.

• Sun Java 6 Update 18 Released
  Sun has released an update to the Early Release Program with the following changes:

HotSpot version 16

Support for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

JavaFX performance improvements

Java WebStart related improvements for Java Store requirements

List of deployment features:

Info

• Lessons learned from getting .NET to REST with Java Performance …
  By Andreas Grabner
  On a recent project I had to call Java REST services from a .NET Client. Several problems came up – ranging from authentication to hidden performance issues. I want to share my lessons learned and encourage you to share your own …

• New Java 6 Collections « Caught By Java
  By Asim
  Unlike Deque, List also allows us to insert or delete at any location within the list with a high performance cost. ArrayList has a higher cost for insert and delete operation as compared to ArrayDeque, as the portions of the array must …

• Stress tests rain on Amazon’s cloud
  CRN Australia – Australia
  The analysis simulated 2000 concurrent users connecting to services from each of … Net development platform, adapters are being released for Java and PHP …

Announcements

• Justice Dept says OK to Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal for Sun …
  By Jordan Robertson
  Clearance by the Justice Department had been held up over questions about the licensing of Java, a programming language that Sun invented that now runs on more than 7 billion electronic devices around the world, including cell phones … Sun’s performance had been shaky for nearly a decade before Oracle outbid IBM Corp. for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company in April. IBM is one of Oracle’s biggest database software rivals, and is a major Sun rival in computer servers. …

• Measure Your System Boot Performance With Bootchart
  By Chinmoy
  Measure Your System Boot Performance With Bootchart … It aggregates the resource utilization and information of various processes using a script running in the boot up and creates an image through a java application after bootup. …
• 10 Really Useful Server Monitoring Tools
  By Tom
  With these server monitoring tools you need never worry ever again about the performance of your website as absolutely anything can be monitored from speed to security. … detailed reports and flexible alerts. This powerful tool, which supports Web 2.0, AJAX and plugin-based applications like Flash and Java, gives you a truly global perspective on how end-users see your site with monitoring agents stationed in the USA, Asia, Africa and Europe. webmetrics …
• Yet another bloody blog: What test technology and tools are you …
  By Mark Crowther
  It came as little surprise that the use of Selenium and Ruby was not what most expected as say QTP or Java are more commonplace. This prompted me to think about: What technologies and tools are you using now in the

Info

• A Few Speed Improvements – Blog – Stack Overflow
  By Jeff Atwood
  Anyway, we believe that performance is a feature, and we’re serious about the Stack Overflow family of sites being as fast as we can make them. We continue to revisit our performance every couple of months and try to improve it a little …
• Some Factors Driving UI Performance Analysis « Seven Seconds
  Ive decided to put some initial thoughts about factors that should be used by SPE’s for recommending a UI Performance Analysis project Ill briefly summarize …
• Java World: Performance Tuning in J2EE Applications
  By Pinaki
  Performance Tuning in J2EE Applications When it comes to enterprise scale Java applications there maybe severe performance degradations due to software architecture design flaws and application Infrastructure setup. …
• Carsonified » Five Things That Will Kill Your Site
  By Jonathan Howell
  This involves performance testing your application in advance. Set a level for what you consider to be an acceptable response time, and ramp up simulated users carrying out typical tasks until you exceed that threshold. … In theory modern garbage collected languages like Java and C# make memory leaks much less likely than the direct memory allocation of C and C++, but they are still possible: watch for memory allocated by static classes, caches that are not cleared, …
• Write high performance Java data access applications Part 3 Data …
  pureQuery is a high-performance Java data access platform focused on simplifying … Performance monitoring You can use hooks to measure API calls runtime …
• J2EE and Oracle Performance Musings: SQL Server Performance Snapshots
  By Chris Adkin
  When used with Catalog view and Performance Monitor counters, DMVs can provide the same functionality as Oracle10g’s Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). However, when working with SQL Server 2005, much of the intended purpose of …
• Java Memory Problems Performance, Scalability and Architecture …
  By Alois Reitbauer
  Memory problems in Java applications are manifold und easily lead to performance and scalability problems. Especially in J EE applications with a high number of parallel users memory management must be a central part of the application …

How To

• Java Tips: Optimizing your Map loop | satukubik
  By Nanda Firdausi
  From my tests, I observe that the performance of the first template depends on the backing object. If we are using HashMap, the performance is less or more the same as the second template. If we are using Hashtable, the performance of …

Java

• Java Standard Edition 6 Performance
  Java SE 6 Performance White Paper Javaâ„¢ Platform Performance Engineering Sun … and Performance Enhancements 2.1 Runtime Performance Improvements 2.11 …
• Java SE 6 Update 15
  Security and garbage collection update.
• Java SE 6 Update 16
  Security update.

]]> http://www.robertcasto.com/2009/08/08/week-in-review-8-august-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.robertcasto.com/2009/08/01/week-in-review-1-august-2009/ http://www.robertcasto.com/2009/08/01/week-in-review-1-august-2009/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:20:10 +0000 robert.casto http://www.robertcasto.com/?p=157

Java SE tools for Performance Analysis and debugging GlassFish …
By admin
Java SE tools for Performance Analysis and debugging GlassFish. Teknoloji. 29 Jul 2009. For effective performance analysis, it is very important that you can collect data and collect them consistently. For you to collect quality data, …

Five Technical Details to understand before performing Load …
By Jaideep
For example it may be .Net or J2EE or any other. 2. Servers: What all server services you are using to run/ use this application? What standard server applications are used for Presentation, Application and Database level? Some ex… … 5. Access details: Last but not the least important point is how the users will be accessing the application – via LAN, through dial-up, through internet, through some specific port and third party tool etc. AddThis Social Bookmark Button …

• · Performance considerations while working with Strings and …
  By vogella
  Strings are very frequently used in Java programs. This blog post tries to explain what a programmer needs to consider from a performance point of view. It will also explain in what situations you should use StringBuilder instead of …

Tool

• · Groovy’s SQL Switch: A Powerful Tool In The Quest For A Truly Real …
  By Jason Kincaid
  … of the processing costs for the competing technologies below). The new software runs on special Intel boxes, with performance that the company says matches 100 standard SQL servers. For more, you can check out the full product spec sheet here. … Did they have to give it the same name as one of the main dynamic languages for Java? reply · Dan Grossman (@w3roi) – July 23rd, 2009 at 3:19 am PDT. Good to see they’re still going after almost having their code stolen. …

• · Borland Adapts Silk Test Suite For Agile Development
  InformationWeek – Manhasset,NY,USA
  By Charles Babcock Borland has adapted its Silk line of software testing tools to better accommodate modern development methods, particularly Agile-style …

• · java.net: Kirk Pepperdine Interviewed by Janice Heiss
  Janice Heiss interviews Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine about Java performance tuning and more in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
• · The Disco Blog » Blog Archive » To recurse or not: Euler challenge #2
  By Andy
  While I implemented problem #1 in Groovy, I thought it would be interesting to solve problem #2 in both Java and Groovy as I wanted to get a good feel for the performance differences between solving Fibonacci via recursion and iteration …
• Architect’s Blog
  By Guy Nirpaz
  New proxy implementation now supports faster fetch times, so that reading objects by their id from local cache is almost as fast as accessing a java.util.ConcurrentHashMap (in Java) or a Dictionary (in .NET). Raw performance of …
• PHP’s Scalability and Performance comparison over Java – Digg model
  By Jiltin
  In addition, many versions of PHP was used in the test, and substantial performance improvements have been made since and are continuing to be made. Here is the article from oreillynet: PHP scales! The word on the street is that “Java …
• Why is Performance Monitoring so hard? – brettdargan.com
  By admin
  Current State – Instantaneous State based; Alerting; Historical Stats; Trace (System > Component > Request) ~ Vertical Profiling through technologies; Profiling – usually technology focused, like Java Profiling; Vital Signs … Production – Under Load Times (batch or interactive); Production – Under Load and component Failures; Dev – Design/Architecture; Dev – Impl time; Test – Environment Issues – ala. Troubleshooting the Integration; Load Test Time; Soak Test Time …
• Amazon Web Services Developer Community Performance Monitoring for …
  Performance Monitoring for Autoscaling. Posted Aug 8 2008 943 AM PDT … As a Java developer I think of JMX which is baked into Java 5 and can be leveraged …

Book

• · AVIRADS-urs always: Java Performance Tuning 2nd edition – Jack Shirazi
  By avirads
  Method profiling can be done by java -Xrunhprof:cpu=samples,thread=y <classname> jhat included in JDK is Java Heap Analysis Tool. The JDK provides two methods for monitoring the amount of memory used by the runtime system. …

Product

• · GigaSpaces’ XAP 7 focuses on performance
  SDTimes.com – San Bruno,CA,USA
  XAP allows Java applications to be provisioned into distributed environments without requiring code changes or separate components for clustering, …