MySQL and Spring Boot Configuration and Optimization

Integrating MySQL with Spring Boot is a common setup for building robust backend systems. However, just getting the connection to work is not enough — real-world applications demand reliability, speed, and scalability. This post explores Spring Boot MySQL performance tuning along with setup best practices.

🧩 Why MySQL + Spring Boot?

MySQL is widely adopted for its:

Ease of setup
Strong community support
Compatibility with JPA and Hibernate
Support for ACID transactions and replication

Spring Boot’s auto-configuration makes it a natural pairing, simplifying boilerplate code while allowing fine-grained control over performance.

📦 Project Setup

1. Add Required Dependencies

In pom.xml:

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>

</dependency>

<groupId>mysql</groupId>

<artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>

<scope>runtime</scope>

</dependency>

🔧 Configuring `application.yml`

spring:

datasource:

url: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myapp_db?useSSL=false&serverTimezone=UTC

username: root

password: root

driver-class-name: com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver

jpa:

hibernate:

ddl-auto: update

show-sql: true

properties:

hibernate:

dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL8Dialect

This sets up a standard database connection. Let’s now enhance it with Spring Boot MySQL performance tuning strategies.

🚀 Performance Tuning Tips

1. Connection Pooling with HikariCP

HikariCP is the default pool in Spring Boot 2.0+ and it’s very fast. Customize it:

spring:

datasource:

hikari:

maximum-pool-size: 10

minimum-idle: 5

idle-timeout: 30000

max-lifetime: 1800000

connection-timeout: 20000

2. Indexing Your Tables

In MySQL, always index columns used in WHERE, JOIN, and ORDER BY clauses.

CREATE INDEX idx_user_email ON users(email);

3. Avoiding N+1 Problem

Use @EntityGraph or JOIN FETCH in queries to fetch associated entities efficiently.

@Query("SELECT u FROM User u JOIN FETCH u.roles")

List<User> findAllWithRoles();

4. Batch Inserts/Updates

Enable batch processing to minimize DB round-trips:

spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.batch_size: 30

🧪 Monitoring and Observability

Use tools like:

Spring Boot Actuator for metrics
MySQL Slow Query Log for identifying bottlenecks
JProfiler / VisualVM for JVM monitoring

✅ Best Practices

Avoid using ddl-auto=update in production
Use Flyway or Liquibase for migrations
Prefer pagination over full dataset retrieval
Isolate read/write queries if scaling horizontally

🧩 Conclusion

Setting up MySQL with Spring Boot is straightforward, but Spring Boot MySQL performance tuning helps ensure the system performs efficiently under load. By optimizing connection pooling, queries, and Hibernate behavior, you make your app more scalable and responsive.