Starting on MySQL 8.0.1, a very updated replica server will be more efficient (and probably faster) than previous MySQL versions because of improvements in the relationship between the replication threads. Preliminary testing showed a benefit of up to 65% on Sysbench Update Index.…

MySQL 8.0.1 introduces a new mechanism to track the dependencies between transactions. This feature is used to optimize the binary log applier on asynchronous replication slaves, improving the throughput significantly on workloads where there is low-concurrency on the master and/or on systems with very fast storage.…

In this blog, we’ll look at how to achieve better-than-linear scaling.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. For example, we consider a system scalable if it is capable of increasing its total output under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability.

It is often accepted as a fact that systems (in particular databases) can’t scale better than linearly. By this I mean when you double resources, the expected performance doubles, at best (and often is less than doubled).  

We can attribute this assumption to Amdahl’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), and later …

In this blog post, we’ll look at the actions and efforts Percona experts took to scale Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Introduction

When we first started analyzing Percona XtraDB Cluster performance, it was pretty bad. We would see contention even with 16 threads. Performance was even worse with sync binlog=1, although the same pattern was observed even with the binary log disabled. The effect was not only limited to OLTP workloads, as even other workloads (like update-key/non-key) were also affected in a wider sense than OLTP.

That’s when we started analyzing the contention issues and found multiple problems. We will discuss all these problems and the solutions we adapted. But …

MySQL 8.0 introduces Common Table Expressions (CTE). My colleague Guilhem has written several blog posts on how to use CTEs , and you can also read about it in the MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual. In this blog post, I will focus on how using a CTE instead of a view or a derived table can improve performance.…

One of the interesting features introduced in MySQL 5.7 is that innodb_buffer_pool_size is a dynamic variable (since 5.7.5, to be more specific). Yet, past experience tells us that just because a variable is dynamic, it does not make it is safe to change it on the fly.

To find out how safe this new feature is, I measured throughput on a synthetic workload (sysbench 1.0 running the oltp script) as I made changes to this variable. In this post, I will show the results that came through.

The Environment

For my tests, I used a Google Cloud Compute instance of type n1-standard-4 (that is 4 vCPUs and 15 GB of memory) with 25 GB of persistent …

In this blog, we’ll look at evaluating the performance of an SST data transfer without encryption.

A State Snapshot Transfer (SST) operation is an important part of Percona XtraDB Cluster. It’s used to provision the joining node with all the necessary data. There are three methods of SST operation available: mysqldump, rsync, xtrabackup. The most advanced one – xtrabackup – is the default method for SST in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

We decided to evaluate the current state of xtrabackup, focusing on the process of transferring data between the donor and joiner nodes tp find out if there is any room for improvements or optimizations.

Taking into account that the security of the network connections used for Percona XtraDB Cluster deployment is one of the most important factors that affects SST performance, we will evaluate SST operations in two setups: without network encryption, and in …

In this blog post, I’ll take a look at the performance of the Samsung 960 Pro SSD NVME.

First, I know the Samsung 960 Pro is a consumer SSD NVME drive, not intended for sustained data center workloads. But the AnandTech review looked good enough that I decided to take it for a test spin to see if it would work well with MySQL benchmarks.

Before that, I decided to do a simple sysbench file IO test to see how the drives handled sustained workloads, and if it would start acting up.

My expectation for a consumer SSD drive is that its write consistency will suffer. Many of those drives can sustain high bursts for short periods of time but have to slow down to keep up with write leveling (and other …

The MariaDB subquery cache feature added in MariaDB 5.3 is not widely known. Let’s see what it is and how it works.

What is a subquery cache?

The MariaDB subquery cache optimizes the execution of correlated subqueries. Correlated subqueries refer to a value from the parent query. For example:

SELECT id FROM product WHERE price NOT IN (SELECT MAX(price) FROM product GROUP BY category);

MariaDB only uses this optimization if the parent query is a SELECT, not an UPDATE or a DELETE. The subquery results get cached only for the duration of the parent query.

MariaDB added the subquery cache in v5.3. It is controlled by …

In this blog post, I’ll look for the bottleneck that prevented the performance in my previous post from achieving better results.

The powerful machine I used in the tests in my previous post has a comparatively slow disk, and therefore I expected my tests would hit a point when I couldn’t increase performance further due to the disk speed.

Hardware configuration:

Processors: physical = 4, cores = 72, virtual = 144, hyperthreading = yes
Memory: 3.0T
Disk speed: about 3K …