In a previous post, I covered porting MySQL 5.6 to POWER and subsequently, some new record performance numbers with MySQL 5.6.17 on POWER8.

Well, those following at home will be aware that not only is the next sentence sponsored by IBM Legal, but that MySQL 5.7 alleviates a bunch of the mutex contention that we saw with MySQL 5.6. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In looking at MySQL performance on POWER, it’s inevitable that I should look at MySQL 5.7 and what’s coming up in the next stable release of MySQL.

Surprisingly, a bunch of the core code in InnoDB and MySQL dealing with mutexes has changed in MySQL 5.7 when …

The following sentence is brought to you by IBM Legal. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Okay, now that is out of the way….

If you’re the kind of person who follows the MySQL bugs database closely or subscribes to the MySQL Internals mailing list, you may have worked out that I’ve spent a small amount of time poking at MySQL on modern POWER systems.

Unlike Intel CPUs, POWER CPUs require explicit memory barriers to synchronize memory state between different CPUs. This means that when you’re implementing synchronization primitives, you have one extra thing to get …

As many of you know, I’ve been working in the MySQL world for quite a while now. IN fact, it was nearly 10 years ago when I first started hacking on MySQL Cluster at MySQL AB.

Most recently, I was at Percona which was a wonderful journey where over my nearly three years there the company at least doubled in size, launched several new software products and greatly improved the quality and frequency of releases.

However the time has come for something completely different. The MySQL world is rather mature, the future of …

Last night my residential area lost power for about 2 hours, between 2-4 am. This reminded me of something, and there’s analogies to MySQL infrastructure. Power companies have over recent years invested a lot of money in making the supply more reliable. But, it does fail occasionally still.

From my perspective, the question becomes: is it worth the additional investment for the power companies? Those extra few decimal points in reliability come at a very high cost, and still things can go wrong. So a household (or business) that relies on continuity has to put other measures in place anyway. If the power company has an obligation to deliver to certain standards, it might be more economical for them to provide suitable equipment (UPS, small generator) to these households and business (for free!) and the resulting setup would provide actual continuity rather than merely higher reliability with occasional failures. Everybody …