Introduction

Disk I/O is frequently the performance bottleneck with relational databases. With AWS recently releasing 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, I wanted to do some benchmarking with pgbench and PostgreSQL 9.2. Prior to this release the maximum available I/O capacity was 2,000 IOPs per volume. EBS IOPs are read and written in 16Kb chunks with their performance limited by both the I/O capacity of the EBS volumes and the network bandwidth between an EC2 instance and the EBS network. My goal isn't to provide a PostgreSQL tuning guide, an EC2 tuning guide, or a database deathmatch complete with graphs; I'll just be displaying what kind of performance is available out-of-the-box without substantive tuning. In other words, this is an exploratory benchmark not a comparative benchmark. I would have liked to compare the performance of 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes with 2,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, but I ran out of time so that will have to wait for a following …

Introduction

Disk I/O is frequently the performance bottleneck with relational databases. With AWS recently releasing 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, I wanted to do some benchmarking with pgbench and PostgreSQL 9.2. Prior to this release the maximum available I/O capacity was 2,000 IOPs per volume. EBS IOPs are read and written in 16Kb chunks with their performance limited by both the I/O capacity of the EBS volumes and the network bandwidth between an EC2 instance and the EBS network. My goal isn't to provide a PostgreSQL tuning guide, an EC2 tuning guide, or a database deathmatch complete with graphs; I'll just be displaying what kind of performance is available out-of-the-box without substantive tuning. In other words, this is an exploratory benchmark not a comparative benchmark. I would have liked to compare the performance of 4,000 PIOPs EBS volumes with 2,000 PIOPs EBS volumes, but I ran out of time so that will have to wait for a following …

Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers will handle such OLTP workloads in the CPU and IO-bound cases. For this test we used a PowerEdge R720 box with a fast PCI-e flash card as storage.

By default linkbench dataset has 10M ids(after load of data size of datadir ~10GB). We used this dataset to check server behavior when data fully fits …

With databases, choices of algorithms influence performance characteristics significantly. It is often very easy to find a situation where one database will perform much worse than others, which is why you will hear database engine developers cry out that benchmarks are flawed.

The best benchmark is one that closely matches what your application actually does, which is why you see the TPC create benchmarks to match hypothetical situations - like a warehouse that has inventory arriving and being shipped out all the time. These situations in turn create “workloads” on the database. To give some context, a workload may perform differently on a different database engine because of how many concurrent modifications are required, the ratio of reads/writes, how much data is modified in a transaction, and where in the data set the reads and writes are (are there hot records or hot tables?). These …

Find duplicates To find duplicate records you can use GROUP BY and count on the attributes which you want to check for duplicates and use HAVING to select all records with a count greater then one: Asume we have the following table and data: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test ( column_pk INT(11) NOT NULL [...]

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0-rc1 on May 7, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this RC release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages

This is an Release Candidate quality release and is not intended for production. If you want a high-quality, generally available release, the current stable version should be used (currently 2.0.7 in the 2.0 series at the time of writing).

New Features:

• This version of Percona XtraBackup has implemented full …

After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB.
I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements for that), so it will produce all good amount of reads.

A few words about the hardware: I am going to use new the Dell PowerEdge R420 with two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2450 0 @ 2.10GHz, 48GB of RAM and SATA SSD: Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB.

Workload: I will use two different schemas. The first schema is from sysbench, and the table looks like:

CREATE TABLE sbtest$I (
id BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT …

This week we discuss Tungsten and MySQL 5.6 replication with friend of the show, Giuseppe Maxia (aka the Data Charmer). Ear Candy is MariaDB's Cassandra storage engine, and At the Movies is Giuseppe's "MySQL 5.6 Replication – features and usability" video from Open Database Camp.

Events
DB Hangops in May will be Wed May 8th and 22nd.
Upcoming MySQL tech tours

Training
SkySQL Trainings
Tungsten University trainings

read more

Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 was released May 6.

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL on May 6, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup is the world’s only open-source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series.

New Features:

• This version of Percona XtraBackup has implemented full support …

This little guide will describe the steps you have to take to use utf-8 in a complete web application using MySQL and PHP. The Database You have to specify the utf8 character set on all tables and text columns in your database. This will ensure that MySQL stores and retrieves the values encoded in UTF-8. [...]