Turns out that I need to get beefier machines. My test system has 2 Xeon E5 series CPUs, so that’s 4 cores + HT * 2 CPUs = 16 CPU hardware threads. 5.6 is supposed to run better at lower concurrency levels when there are more cores, so I’m on the hunt for a machine at Yahoo that has Xeon E7 series chips, or 4 E5 series.

I did test against a new machine that I acquired which has 24 CPU cores, and 5.6 did perform better, but still came in (QPS) slightly lower than our standard 5.5.33 Percona Server build. Percona server benchmarked at roughly 117,000 QPS versus 115,000 QPS for 5.6.14 on the oltp read only sysbench test (point selects + range queries).

I’m going to try my 24 core machine with higher concurrency levels this weekend (I’m still jet lagged from my California trip) and my mad scientist hours are usually from 1AM to 3AM anyways…

Have to go begging for CPUs now.

Turns out that I need to get beefier machines. My test system has 2 Xeon E5 series CPUs, so that’s 4 cores + HT * 2 CPUs = 16 CPU hardware threads. 5.6 is supposed to run better at lower concurrency levels when there are more cores, so I’m on the hunt for a machine at Yahoo that has Xeon E7 series chips, or 4 E5 series.

I did test against a new machine that I acquired which has 24 CPU cores, and 5.6 did perform better, but still came in (QPS) slightly lower than our standard 5.5.33 Percona Server build. Percona server benchmarked at roughly 117,000 QPS versus 115,000 QPS for 5.6.14 on the oltp read only sysbench test (point selects + range queries).

I’m going to try my 24 core machine with higher concurrency levels this weekend (I’m still jet lagged from my California trip) and my mad scientist hours are usually from 1AM to 3AM anyways…

Have to go begging for CPUs now.

Actually, this is episode 156, sorry about the error in the title!

This week we interview Mats Kindahl, a MySQL Senior Principal Software Engineer, about the open source Fabric framework for transaction-safe, semi-automatic sharding and high availability. Because we recorded this during the MySQL Connect conference there is no Ear Candy, nor At the Movies.

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MySQL Tech Day in Paris Thursday Oct 10th

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Oracle released a bunch of MySQL stuff they’ve been working on since the last huge release, and my blog reader filled up with a few dozen posts I’m gonna have to read through so I don’t feel ignorant. Dear MySQL Engineering Team, could you take pity on me and release these gradually over the course of a month or so next time? Especially since Google discontinued Reader, and I’m using Feedly now, and it has a bug that I can’t figure …

I had to laugh (just a bit) at this on the exhibitor floor at Oracle Open World 2013. There was a large MongoDB presence at the Slot 301. There are a few reasons.
First, the identity crisis remains. There is no MongoDB in the list of exhibitors, it’s 10gen, but where is the 10gen representation in the sign. 99.99% of attendees would not know this.
Second, the first and only slide I saw (as shown below), tries to directly compare implementing a solution to Oracle. The speaker made some comment but I really zoned out quickly. Having worked with MongoDB, even on one of my own projects, contemplated the ROI of being proficient in this for consulting, even discussing at length with the CEO and CTO, and hearing only issues with MongoDB with existing MySQL clients, I have come to the conclusion that MongoDB is a niche product. It’s …

We are looking for community feedback on the use-cases for the Query Cache in MySQL.

As astute followers will notice, the query cache is now off by default in 5.6, but realistically it’s always been disabled because the previous configuration was ON with zero memory allocated to it.

The reason for its disabling, is that the query cache does not scale with high-throughput workloads on multi-core machines. This is due to an internal global-lock, which can often be seen as a hotspot in performance_schema.

The ideal scenario for the query cache tends to be largely read-only, where there are a number of very expensive queries which examine millions of rows only to return a …

This is not big deal, but I have published my generic option file and commandline handler in a new version. If you have used any of my C-programs that are on sourceforge, I think you have seen that most of them use this, in one version or another. It was a long time since I did a generic upgrade of this though, and all utilities seems to have had it's own version embedded, so I have now created a version with most of the new things in it, and I have also updated the documentation.

The cool thing with this library is that it is generic and largely follows the MySQL / MariaDB style of options and config files. Handling commandline options and config files in C is otherwise something you largely have to do yourself. This little library handles all that for you, and it is also quite advanced and has many cool options, such as support for integers and string with proper type checking, array of values, a kind of associative arrays is also …

I recently blogged on setting up Experimental Git mirror of Oracle MySQL trees up on GitHub. I’m now happy to announce that there are also mirrors for:

• Percona Server
• Percona XtraBackup
• Percona Playback

I’ve also updated the Oracle MySQL GIT mirror to include MySQL 5.7 and the (now abandoned) MySQL 6.0. I include the abandoned 6.0 tree as it can provide useful archaeology as to where some code came from.

I’d love to hear about any positive/negative experiences using these mirrors. Hopefully shortly I’ll fix up the last …

Syslog is widely used for logging. It allows distributed logging. Having MySQL/MariaDB audit data logged to a remote Syslog server is a strong guaranty regarding security of the audit data. PCI compliance requires separation of duties. The separation of duties between DBA profiles and a security officer is a way to guaranty that Audit data [...]

As I wrote in a previous post, MariaDB / MySQL has some issues with the standard UTF-8 encoding there. This UTF-8 encoding limits us to 3 UTF-8 bytes or 2 UNICODE bytes if you want to look at it that way. This is slightly limiting, but for languages it is usually pretty much OK, although there are some little used languages in the 3 byte UNICODE range. But in addition to languages, you will be missing symbols, such as smileys!

Help is on the way though, in the utf8mb4 character set that is part of both MariaDB and MySQL. This is a character set that is just like the one just called utf8, except this one accepts all the UNICODE characters with up to 3 UNICODE bytes, or 4 bytes using the UTF-8 encoding.

This means that there are more limits to how long a column might be when using utf8mb4 compared …