Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL

Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large …

Thanks to all of those who came by our booth and to see Leif’s presentation on Read Optimization, and to my Lightning Talk on OLTP and OLAP at the Percona MySQL Conference and Expo. It was an incredible week and a great place to launch TokuDB v6.0 from! A big thanks to Percona for a great event, to …

This week, I was at Percona Live, and it was a lot of fun! I even got to give a talk on write optimization techniques (not just ours), that I’m told will be online soon.

But if you missed that, or even if you didn’t, I’m still in the valley until Monday night. I’ll be speaking very briefly, and fielding questions this Monday, April 16th, at 6PM, at the Silicon Valley NewSQL group’s meetup in Sunnyvale. It’s shaping up to be a great crowd—Amazon, Microsoft, Clustrix, VoltDB, Drizzle, and many others will be there. So if you’re at all curious, come on by, I’d love to talk to you. Hope to see you there!

To learn more about TokuDB: …

Checkpointing — which involves periodically writing out dirty pages from memory — is central to the design of crash recovery for both TokuDB and InnoDB. A key issue in designing a checkpointing system is how often to checkpoint, and TokuDB takes a very different approach from InnoDB. How often and how much InnoDB checkpoints is complicated, but under certain workloads it can be relatively infrequent. In contrast, TokuDB runs a complete checkpoint starting one minute after the last one ended.

Frequent checkpoints make for fast recovery. Once MySQL crashes, the storage engine needs to replay the log to get back to a correct state. The length of the log is a function of the time since the last checkpoint for TokuDB and a more complicated function of the workload for InnoDB. And replaying the log is single threaded. So TokuDB recovers in minutes, and …

A key feature of our new TokuDB v6.0 release, which I have been blogging about this week, is compression. Compression is always on in TokuDB, and the compression we’ve achieved in the past has been quite good. See a previous post on the 18x compression achieved by TokuDB v5.0 on one benchmark. In our latest release, we’ve updated the way compression works and got 50% improvement on compression.

I decided to present numbers on the same set of data as the old post, so see that post for experimental details.

But first, what are the changes? TokuDB compresses large blocks of data — on the order of MB, rather than the 16KB that InnoDB uses — …

Master/slave replication is an important tool that gets used in many ways: distributing read loads among many slaves for performance, using a slave for backups so the master can handle live load, geographically distributed disaster recovery, etc. The Achilles’ Heal of slave performance is that slave workloads are single-threaded. The master can have many clients inserting, updating, querying, whereas the slave has only one insertion client: the master. InnoDB single-client performance is much slower than its multi-client performance, which means that the bottleneck in a master/slave system is often the rate at which a slave can keep up.

If the master has an average transactions per second (tps) that is higher than what the slave can handle, the slave will fall further and further behind. If the slaves are being used to distribute read workload, for example, the results they produce will fall further out of date. If a slave is used to …

We are excited to announce TokuDB® v6.0, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

This version offers feature and performance enhancements over previous releases, support for XA (two-phase transactional commits), better compression, and reduced performance variability associated with checkpointing. This release also brings TokuDB support up to date on MySQL v5.1, MySQL v5.5 and MariaDB v5.2. There’s a lot of great technical stuff under the hood in this release and I’ll be reviewing the improvements one-by-one over the course of this week.

I’ll be posting more details about the new features and performance, so here’s an overview of what’s in store.

Replication Slave Lag

One of the things TokuDB does well is single-threaded insertions, which translates directly into less slave lag. With TokuDB v6.0, we introduce support for XA, which insures for …

Looks like we’ll be having some more fun at the Percona Live MySQL Conference! In addition to our booth and my colleague Tim’s talk, my lightning talk was accepted. The title is “OLTP and OLAP – Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!” The lightning talks, given in a TBD order, will start Wednesday evening (April 11th) at around 6:30 pm.

Below is the abstract I submitted.

OLTP and OLAP – Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!

…

On Monday, I took a break from planning for the upcoming Percona Live MySQL Conference (where we have a session, lightning talk, booth, and other misc activities planned) to go attend the UK-Massachusetts Innovation Economies Conference at the MIT Media Lab. The event featured Gov. Deval Patrick, MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito, industry experts such as Sheila Marcelo (founder of Care.com), and …

Tokutek and Percona are giving away free tickets to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (worth $995 each), and you can win them! We’re also giving away copies of High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition (worth $55 each).

This year’s event is the best ever, with a better lineup of talks and speakers than ever before.  It’s the one event you should not miss if you’re at all interested in MySQL.  We really want you to be there — and that’s why we’re joining with Percona to give away free tickets! It’s easy to enter:

• Follow our Twitter feed, and retweet us when we mention this contest
• Tweet “My favorite #MySQL conference …