Selecting the most appropriate solution for a MySQL HA infrastructure is as much a business and philosophical decision as it is a technical one, but often the choice is made without adequately considering all three perspectives.  When too much attention is paid to one of these aspects at the cost of the others, the resulting system may be over-engineered, poorly-performing, and/or various other flavors of suboptimal.

On Wednesday, June 5, at 10 a.m. PDT (1700 UTC), I will be presenting a webinar entitled, Choosing a MySQL HA Solution, in which we’ll explore the topic of MySQL HA from each of these perspectives.  The goal will be to motivate your thinking about HA in a holistic fashion and help …

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results.

Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident.

First, some background information. All tests were conducted on Percona’s Cisco UCS C250 test machine, and both the vCache and FlashCache tests used the same 2.2TB Virident FlashMAX II as the cache storage device. EXT4 is the filesystem, and CentOS 6.4 the operating system, although the pre-release modules I received from Virident required the use of the CentOS 6.2 kernel, 2.6.32-220, so that was the kernel in use for all of the benchmarks on both systems. The benchmark tool used was sysbench 0.5 and the version of MySQL used was …

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set comparison between vCache and FlashCache and also to conduct some benchmarks for the use case where the MySQL working set is significantly larger than the InnoDB buffer pool (thus leading to a lot of buffer pool disk reads) but still small enough to fit into the cache device. In this post and the next, I’ll present some of those results.

Disclosure: The research and testing for this post series was sponsored by Virident.

Usability is, to some extent, a subjective call, as I may have preferences …

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things will happen; either the results returned from a MyISAM FTS query will be exactly identical to the same query when performed against InnoDB data, OR that the results returned by InnoDB FTS will somehow be “better” (as much as it’s actually possible to do this in a single blog post) than what MyISAM gives us.

Recall that we have two different sets of …