In this blog entry I’d like to describe how you might be able to improve how MySQL performs on Windows by ensuring that you take advantage of a Windows specific configuration setting.

On Unix systems, MySQL programs treat the localhost host name specially. For connections to localhost, MySQL programs attempt to connect to the local server by using a Unix socket file, which has some performance advantages over a TCP/IP connection. Windows does not support Unix sockets, however, and hence does not benefit from this optimisation.

However, the use of shared memory connections on Windows can offer significant performance improvements over the use of TCP/IP connections. Shared memory connections are obviously only useful when both the MySQL client and server processes are executing on the same machine, but when …

This is a little quiz (could be a discussion). I know what we tend to prefer (and why), but we’re interested in hearing additional and other opinions!

Given the way MySQL/MariaDB is architected, what would you prefer to see in a new server, more cores or higher clock speed? (presuming other factors such as CPU caches and memory access speed are identical).

For example, you might have a choice between

• 2x 2.4GHz 6 core, or
• 2x 3.0GHz 4 core

which option would you pick for a (dedicated) MySQL/MariaDB server, and why?

And, do you regard the “total speed” (N cores * GHz) as relevant in the decision process? If so, when and to what degree?

MySQL 5.7 aims to be the most secure MySQL Server release ever, and that means some significant changes in SSL/TLS.  This post aims to tie together individual enhancements introduced over the span of several Development Milestone Releases (DMRs) into the larger initiative.  In the simplest terms, we hope to have a minimal TLS configuration enabled by default, and for connections to prefer TLS by default.  Let’s dig into the various aspects of this:

Generation of TLS key material

MySQL Server has long supported TLS connections, yet very few deployments are actually configured to leverage this.  This is partly because creation of key material – the certificates and keys needed to establish TLS connections – is a multi-step, extra, manual process.  Basic TLS concepts have to be understood, third-party software …

It’s been almost a year since I benchmarked MariaDB and MySQL on our good old 4 CPU / 32 Cores / 64 Threads Sandy Bridge server. There seem to be a few interesting things happened since that time.

• MySQL 5.6.23 peak throughput dropped by ~8% compared to 5.6.14. Looks like this regression appeared in MySQL 5.6.21.
• 10.0.18 (git snapshot) peak threads increased by ~20% compared to 10.0.9 and reached parity with 5.6.23 (not with 5.6.20 though).
• 10.1.4 (git snapshot) and 5.7.5 are the champions (though 10.1.4 was usually 1-5% faster). Both have similar peaks @ 64 threads. They seem to be pushing this system limits, since both have capacity to scale more.
• 5.7.6 has serious (~50%) scalability regression compared to 5.7.5. There is heavy LOCK_plugin mutex contention, which seem to be caused …

With the changes to performance_schema in MySQL 5.7 Development Milestone Release it is now possible to analyze and profile the execution of stored programs. This is highly useful if you develop more complex stored procedures and try to find the bottlenecks. The "old" performance_schema up to MySQL 5.6 only reported a CALL statement with a runtime, but no information on statements that were executed WITHIN the stored procedure. Now let's try this in the latest MySQL 5.7.6 DMR release. After creating some test table and a test stored procedure we need to activate the events_statements_history_long consumer, which is OFF by default:

mysql> UPDATE setup_consumers SET ENABLED="YES" 
           WHERE NAME = "events_statements_history_long"; 

Then let's call the stored procedure that we want to inspect:

mysql> CALL …

Full text is a critical point when it comes to mysql. It used to have that feature in MyISAM but that’s not really maintained anymore nor it is advised to use unless you have a very specific use case in which it might make sense. There are 3rd party solution which takes the problem away (Lucene, Sphinx, Solr, ElasticSearch) but all bring extra complexity to your setup which has its own cost. So do you need to give up on fulltext search if you’re using MySQL + InnoDB? No! Definitely not.

Alternatives for full-text search in MySQL

I have an live database with 9000+ products with category, brand and short description which is perfect to test my searches on. I’m going to run the queries many times and use profile information to collect more granular and accurate timing information.

LIKE

Well… It’s not a real alternative but just for a sec see how well it behaves.

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE b.name, …

The General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4 has just been announced by Oracle.

The MySQL team at Oracle are excited to announce the General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4, ready for production workloads.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 can be downloaded from mysql.com and the release notes viewed in the MySQL docs.

Figure 1 provides a summary of the enhancements delivered in this release:

• Performance
  • 200M NoSQL Reads/Sec
  • 2.5M SQL Ops/Sec
  • 50% …

In Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems, we explored the paradox that “Big Data” projects pose to organizations and how Tokutek is taking an innovative approach to solving those problems. In this post, we’re going to talk about another hot topic in IT, “The Cloud,” and how enterprises undertaking Cloud efforts often struggle with idea of “problem trading.” Also, for some reason, databases are just given a pass as traditionally “noisy neighbors” and that there is nothing that can be done about it. Lets take a look at why we disagree.

With the birth of the information age came a coupling of business and IT. Increasingly strategic business projects and objectives were reliant on information infrastructure to provide information storage and retrieval instead of paper and filing cabinets. This was the dawn of the database and what gave rise to companies like Oracle, Sybase and MySQL. With the appearance of true Enterprise Grade …

During the process of reviewing our server defaults for MySQL 5.7, we thought that it might be better to change the default transaction isolation level from REPEATABLE-READ to READ-COMMITTED (the default for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server). After some benchmarking, however, it seems that we should stick with REPEATABLE-READ as the default for now.

It’s very easy to modify the default isolation level, however, and it can even be done at the SESSION level. For the most optimal performance you can change the transaction isolation level dynamically in your SESSION according …

MySQL’s default storage engine as of version 5.5 is InnoDB. InnoDB maintains a storage area called the buffer pool for caching data and indexes in memory. By keeping the frequently-accessed data in memory, related searches are retrieved much faster than reading from disk.

When you stop or restart MySQL, you lose the cached data stored in the buffer pool. There is a feature in MySQL 5.6 which allows you to dump the contents of the buffer pool before you shutdown the mysqld process. Then, when you start mysqld again, you can reload the contents of the buffer pool back into memory. You may also …