The latest from the MySQL community

Why should you care about the latest “early adopter” release of the InnoDB Plugin, version 1.0.3?   One word: performance! The release introduces these features:

• Enhanced concurrency & scalability: the “Google SMP patch” using atomic instructions for mutexing
• More efficient memory allocation: ability to use more scalable platform memory allocator
• Improved out-of-the-box scalability: unlimited concurrent thread execution by default
• Dynamic tuning: at run-time, enable or disable insert buffering and adaptive hash indexing

These new performance features can yield up to twice the throughput or more, depending on your workload, platform and other tuning considerations. In another post, we explore some details about these changes, but first, what do these enhancements mean for performance and scalability?

In brief, we’ve tested …

Came across an interesting post by Bret (co-founder of FriendFeed) about how FriendFeed uses MySQL to store "schema-less" data. According to the post, they weren't having issues with scaling existing features but rather they were experiencing pain when trying to add features.

Now the way they are using MySQL is interesting and bizarre at the same time. At a very high level, it seems their approach is to use a RDBMS as if it is a column-oriented database. Of course, it makes me wonder why not just use a column-oriented database? I need to read the post again in the morning (too tired right now so just gave it a quick glance).

I am very interested in hearing thoughts from my peers at Planet MySQL regarding this approach. They seem to …

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …

Next Thursday (February 5th), we're continuing our series of sessions on MySQL performance measuring and improvements with Allan Packer's presentation titled MySQL Performance and Scalability Project - Issues and Opportunities. Allan works in the Performance and Applications Engineering department at Sun Microsystems, so again, expect to get some deep insights into the inner workings of the MySQL Server.

Allan is based in Australia, so note that this session will take place in the morning (Europe) or evening (APAC), respectively.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a …

This Thursday (January 29th), we're continuing our series of sessions on MySQL performance measuring and improvements with David Lutz' presentation titled Scalability Challenges in an InnoDB-based Replication Environment. David works in the Performance and Applications Engineering department at Sun Microsystems, so again, expect to get some deep insights into the inner workings of the MySQL Server.

David is based in California, so note that this session will take place in the morning (America) or evening (Europe), respectively.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working …

This Thursday, we're continuing our series of sessions on MySQL performance measuring and improvements with Richard Smith's presentation titled Scalability by Design - Coding for Systems With Large CPU Counts. Richard works in the Performance and Applications Engineering department at Sun Microsystems, so again, expect to get some deep insights into the inner workings of the MySQL Server.

Richard is based in Australia, so note that this session will take place in the morning (Europe) or evening (APAC), respectively.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. …

tl;dr: The MySQL community rocks. Percona, XtraDB, Drizzle, SSD storage, InnoDB IO scalability challenges.

For anyone who lives and dies by MySQL and InnoDB, things are finally starting to heat up and get interesting. I’ve been banging the “MySQL/InnoDB scales poorly” drums for years now, and despite having paid Enterprise licenses, I haven’t been able to get anywhere. I was pretty excited when Sun …

In all my days at working at MySQL the
LOCK_open mutex have always been a
key mutex to understand, now that I'm
working on scalability improvements of
the server it's as important to change
this mutex into something less contentious.

So last week I finally decided to start
thinking about how we can resolve this
mutex which is at the heart of the MySQL
Server. In principle the idea is that
LOCK_open has been used to protect a
hash table with all the open tables in
the MySQL Server. However it has been
used for many other purposes as well.
So it's not trivial to move around it.

However the main scalability problem
with LOCK_open is the hash lock it
provides. So what to do about it?

My current thinking is that a four-thronged
approach will do the trick.

1) Divide and concquer, perform the …

I am currently tasked with writing Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document for a project. Effective sharding (based on specific criterion) and Scalability are key requirements of the project.

Scalability is traditionally classified as a non-functional requirement. My question to the community is that if scalability is crucial to a project, would it still be classified as a non-functional requirement? Are their cases when scalability requirements would be best classified as functional requirements?

Few months ago I’ve switched one of our internal projects from doing synchronous database saves of analytics data to an asynchronous processing using starling + a pool of workers. This was the day when I really understood the power of specialized queue servers. I was using database (mostly, MySQL) for this kind of tasks for years and sometimes (especially under a highly concurrent load) it worked not so fast… Few times I worked with some queue servers, but those were either some small tasks or I didn’t have a time to really get the idea, that specialized queue servers were created just to do these tasks quickly and efficiently.

All this time (few months now) I was using starling noticed really bad thing in how it works: if workers die (really die, or lock on something for a long time, or just start lagging) …