Testing Your Queries and Performance

Running Queries

Hopefully at this point you have your data in SingleStore. You can check this by running some basic SELECT statements within the SQL Editor. Next, you may want to try out some queries that you were running with your last database. Generally, you’ll want to run queries twice to get a true understanding of the runtime as the first run must create and cache the query plan.

Visual Explain

One great feature of SingleStore Helios is Visual Explain. If you encounter a situation in which your query is taking longer than expected, highlight the desired query in the SQL Editor and click the Visual Explain icon to the left of the Run button. The icon resembles a tree. After clicking, you may then choose between EXPLAIN and PROFILE. Refer to SingleStore Visual Explain to learn how to navigate the visual explanation or profiling of your query.

Once you identify a bottleneck, you should be able to make changes either to your schema or to your query itself in order to improve speed.

You can manually (non-visually) run EXPLAIN or PROFILE from any client; see the links above for details on the commands.

Benchmarking

If you’re moving over from any of the databases we’ve talked about so far, you are probably interested in improving performance. At SingleStore, we’ve developed an easy-to-use tool for benchmarking called dbbench. You can check that out here.

Once you’ve installed the packages to your host machine, you can walk through this tutorial. All you will have to do is change the host from 127.0.0.1 to the endpoint listed for your cluster in the Cloud Portal (it should look something like: svc-xxx-dml.aws-virginia-1.db.memsql.com). The port will remain 3306, as listed. You can then move onto testing based on your application workload.