What is the peak QPS for a MySQL server? I don't know so I created a very artificial benchmark to find out. I then ran that benchmark for MySQL 5.0.84 and 5.1.38 using several storage engines. I was able to exceed 100,000 QPS for the HEAP and InnoDB storage engines. It would be nice if I could get that on a production server.

The benchmark was run on an 8-core x86 server. Clients and mysqld ran on the same server. The clients used mysqlslap and mysqld versions 5.0.84 and 5.1.38 were used. For MySQL 5.1.38, the built-in and plug-in versions of InnoDB were used. The input to mysqlslap was a file with 1M identical SELECT statements and it was run using 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 concurrent sessions. The test was run in 3 modes:

• primary key only - the query is index only on the primary key index. …

I've just spent an hour of my spare time watching an exceptional UC Berkeley Lecture by Arun Sarin, former Vodafone's CEO. He shared his thoughts on leadership, focusing on four major topics that a leader should always keep in mind. I'll try to summarize some points that I intend to keep in mind.

Strategy
Always look at the big picture, keep an eye on what will be your company in 5,10, 15 years. Try to understand the world and anticipate trends. Comunicate clearly through mission and vision and make sure that every step is in the right direction.

Operations
While a good leader should be strategic, never underestimate the daily operations. Make sure that your customers have a good experience with the company. Be sure that they have the needed attention if an issue arises.

People
Be an overall nice person to work with. Choose the right people in the right …

The next meeting of the North Texas MySQL Users Group is next Monday and the presentation will be on designing database tables. This is part of a series for novices with MySQL and/or databases. Too often novices commit obvious sins like BIGINTs for any numeric storage field or indexing every column. EXPLAIN is a valuable tool in optimizing SELECT statements but too many DBAs do not discover it until well after they are stuck with a small, unruly group of badly designed tables.

Using EXPLAIN is seen as a 'dark art' by too many and hopefully we can get the novices in North Texas off on the right foot. The meeting is free and starts at 7:00 PM in the Sun Offices, Suite 700, 16000 Dallas Tollway, in Dallas. All are welcome and please try to be a bit early as the …

The present in my RSS feed this morning was an article by Peter Zaitsev on :
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/20/guidance-for-mysql-optimizer-developers/

One of the changes made recently to Drizzle, is a redesign of our executioner. This was done by Padraig. MySQL inherited a design where the parser uses one Global Lex Structure to fill in the members of the query for later use. This structure has members in it for every form of query that can be executed. The structure is also assigned an ENUM that will be used later for determining if the query is a SELECT, INSERT, etc... via a switch/case dispatcher.

This of course creates a number of limitations in the design, especially for Drizzle …

Many people noticed my tweet just over a week ago that I tendered my resignation at Sun Microsystems. Many people asked me "what next?". Here is my What Next:

Today is the first day of my new job at Gear6, as the Director of Community Development.

In part, this means that I will be doing for Gear6 what Jay and then Dups used to do for MySQL.

I'm the face of my company into the Memcached / Gearman / Drizzle / etc communities, and just as importantly, I'm the face of those open source communities into my company.

I was very positively impressed with the people at Gear6 when we were interviewing each other. I truly believe that they want to do The Right …

I've been meaning to post some real-world data on the performance of the Infobright 3.2 release which happened a few weeks ago after an extended release candidate period. We're just preparing our upgrades now, so I don't have any performance notes over significant data sets or complicated queries to post quite yet.

To make up for that, I decided to address a particular annoyance of mine in the community edition, first because it hadn't been addressed in the 3.2 release (and really, I'm hoping doing this would include it into 3.2.1), and second, simply because the engine being open source means I can. I feel being OSS is one of Infobright's biggest strengths, in addition to being a pretty amazing piece of performance for such a simple, undemanding package in general, and not making use of that would be shame. Read on …

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard …

Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But  modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each have their place, depending on the state of the market/ecosystem where the process/product/service operates. Part of a system can be in a modular phase, where another part of the same system needs integration!

In this context, think of an Open Source project or company’s ability to handle contributions. If the process of interaction between a contributor and the core is not (for whatever reason) clearly defined and predictable, it won’t work. Jamming an additional [in this case …

Your MySQL server is under heavy load or refuses any new connections because MySQL runs out of available threads. Ever wondered why?

For me the easiest way to get a first and very helpful real-time insight in what is happening in your database server is to use the show processlist statement:

mysql> show processlist;
+--------+---------+-----------+-------------+----------------+------+--------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id     | User    | Host      | db          | Command        | Time | State              | Info                                                             |
+--------+---------+-----------+-------------+----------------+------+--------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 426144 | DELAYED | localhost | statistics  | Delayed insert |  170 | Waiting for INSERT | …

I spend large portion of my life working on MySQL Performance Optimization and so MySQL Optimizer is quite important to me. For probably last 10 years I chased first Monty and later Igor with Optimizer complains and suggestions. Here are some general ideas which I think can help to make optimizer in MySQL, MariaDB or Drizzle better.

Make it Plugable Every Major optimizer change causes a lot of pain for some of the users. Even if you improve performance 99 our of 100 queries there are going to be countless users complaining about the change. Due to this problem Optimizer Team was more conservative than I think they could have been. The solution is simple - make optimizer pluggable and make it possible to stick to old optimizer behavior with new MySQL Version.

Make Cost Model Adjustable MySQL Optimizer looks at query plan in terms of disk IOs/Seeks in same way for all data sets. In practice some …