Everyone loves SSD.  It’s a hot topic all around the MySQL community with vendors lining up all kinds of new solutions to attack the “disk io”  problem that has plagued us all for years and years.  At this year’s user conference I talked about SSD’s and MySQL.   Those who follow my blog know I love IO and I love to benchmark anything that can help overcome IO issues.  One of the most exciting things out their at this point are the Intel x-25e drives.  These bad boys are not only fast but relatively inexpensive.  How fast are they?  Let’s just do a quick bit of review here and peak at the single drive #’s from sysbench.    Here you can see that a single X25-e outperforms all my other single drive test.

Yep you have probably seen this type of chart on other sites…   The great thing about the Intel drives is their performance on writes, this difference gives …

Must of really been worn out post UC because my experiments and blogging have dipped to all time lows… but rest assured I am on my way back. I will be following up posting some posts on my Sun/Intel SSD tests I did for my presentation at the UC. This will give those who did not go to the UC a chance to hear me babble on about SSD’s some more ( OH NO, not more babble about SSD’s! ).

Plus of course their is Waffle. Right now I am perplexed as ever by our mysterious index issue… and its been bothering me for weeks! I think I will post some details and look for external opinions very soon.

Pre-UC I put out a teaser on some dbt2 scores in the 50K range.   I mentioned and showed the graphs during my SSD session, but I thought I would show them here for those who skipped the UC or did not attend my session.  Basically what most people consider to be a classic “CPU Bound” workload where all of your data easily fits into memory can also see benefits from moving to SSD’s. Remember just because everything fits into memory doesn’t mean your not going to be doing some operations to disk ( logging, flushes, etc ). Take a look:

Had a fun time being on Percona’s performance panel late last night. For those who were there,  I was probably the only guy you did not recognize:)   The  panel of Ronald Bradford,  Mark Callaghan, Cary Millsap, Jay Pipes, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and myself spent the evening answering questions from the audience and of course drinking Monty’s famous black vodka.  While a lot of the questions drifted away from performance I think everyone had a good time and found the session to be informative.  Now the question i have is : does anyone have any good photo’s of the event?

People always have conversations at the UC that spark ideas for new projects or features, this is my random collection of features or items I need to look into.  Most people can ignore it… but if your interested in what goes on in my head here ya go:

General Innodb:

• I started looking into this before, but I was reminded of it again today…  it would be useful to setup separate innodb buffer pools like the key caches in MyISAM.
• maybe an easy hack to put in a tiered LRU based on file per table.  What I mean by this is internally the internal BP in inno actually uses the space id ( file per table will have a new ID per table )…  this should make it feasible to ( maybe easy ) to move certain spaceid’s up or down the internal LRU list  This maybe an interesting feature, not exactly like pinning a table into the BP but close.    Basically, if a table is accessed and its …

We have 3 presentations today and you may not have been thinking of attending!  What’s wrong with you.

Oh… did you think I was going to say something else?

Stop by say Hi, seek us out after our sessions and introduce yourself.  I would love for you to stop by  give us your idea’s on Waffle, Bigdbahead, MySQL, benchmarks, Life, Oracle, Baseball, or anything else on your mind.

Remember the what’s printed on the front of the Guide… “Don’t Panic”.

First we all get hit hard with News like this…  So we go through lots of stages. Panic, dear, acceptance, etc.  They all come and everyone is left asking now what.

First… look around at and get reassurance from others…

Sheeri has a decent post on her take on the news here.

Second:

As I mentioned earlier, it’s way to early to speculate on what’s going to happen.  Integration can not begin until all the regulatory stuff get handle, which could take months and months.  So their is going to be a really long quiet period of time.  For us internal folks this will be a scarey time of course.  So anything you hear now is …

Everyone who was up @ 7:30am seems to feel tired and subdued.  Everyone I heard from is worried about what this means for MySQL.  Some people have taken to extreme joking running around with cracks about the evil empire and “hail Larry”.    It’s a very tense mood all in all.   The feeling seems to be that the announcement was timed to have maximum effect, others seem to think it was timed so they can all bring us over to the assimilation machine and get our implants embedded in our brains.  I am sure you are going to be hearing a lot of fear & uncertaintity, rumors and the like over the week but their is still a long way to go, and nothing will be worked out officially for months.

That being said it does feel like the ” The end of the world as we know it”  … welcome to black monday.

One last reminder, we ( Yves and I ) will be appearing all over the place at the UC. Here is a quick run down of our schedule:

• Tuesday 10:50 am - 11:35 pm (Free MySQL Camp) I will be presenting “Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes” … a journey into the sometimes silly things we all end up doing.

• Tuesday 2-3pm Yves and I are co-presenting “Distributed Innodb Caching with memcached” … this will be an intro into the Waffle Grid project, what it’s about and what it means to you.

• Tuesday 4:25 pm - 5:10 pm (Free MySQL Camp) Yves will be presenting “NBD (MySQL Cluster) performance tuning and pitfalls”

• Wednesday 2-3pm I will be presenting: “SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming Solid State Disk Revolution” … the title sounded better when I submitted it, because the fact is SSD’s are here! But the big question is what does it …

Only a little over a week before the User conference and I am still burning the midnight oil to get as much information for my presentations as possible. I thought I would tease you a bit here. What do you get when you put 4 Intel X-25E’s ( Sun branded) SSD’s running RAID10 in a Sun 4450 and run the sysbench fileio test on it?