Bringing Flamegraphs to MySQL Query Optimization

Event MySQL Belgian Days (preFOSDEM) 2026

Location Belgian, Brussels

Dates Jan 29, 2026

Presentation Jan 30, 2026 , 1:15 pm

Link 🔗 On event website

Speaker

Vinicius Grippa

Percona, Senior Support Engineer

Tags: #MySQL

Abstract

Brendan Gregg developed flame graphs, which provide a powerful way to visualize hierarchical data. Later on, Tanel Poder introduced the same concept for Oracle queries. This time, I’m bringing this idea for the first time as an open-source project to MySQL. Using the new JSON format for MySQL, we can now perform detailed query analysis based on the actual execution plan, displaying the query’s internal operations in a way that can be programmatically consumed and visualized. In this session, we will walk through how to transform raw execution-plan data into flame graphs and explore the benefits that visualization brings and how it helps us to interpret and diagnose query behavior.

Speaker Bios

Vinicius Grippa

Percona, Senior Support Engineer

Vinicius Grippa is a Senior Support Engineer at Percona. Vinicius joined Percona Support Engineer team in 2017. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a passion for technology and more than 13 years experiences in databases systems. He has experience in designing databases for critical applications and, in the last few years, has become a specialist in MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems. He has helped Percona customers with hundreds of different cases featuring a vast range of scenarios and complexities. Vinicius is also active in the OS community, participating in virtual rooms like Slack, speaking at meetups, and presenting conferences in Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

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