Today Sun announced the availability of MySQL 5.4, which contains a number of performance and scalability enhancements to the base MySQL 5.1 code. For the full run down on all of the enhancements, and the resulting scalability improvements, check out these blogs from Mikael Ronstrom and Allan Packer. You can also read Neelakanth Nadgir's blog, where he describes some performance fixes that were tried but rejected. As he says, sometimes you can learn a lot from the things that don't work out!

This release contains a range of improvements, both from the community (especially Google) and from work that has taken place in the MySQL performance team. As you can guess, we aren't stopping here, and there are a number of additional enhancements in the pipeline for …

After 4hrs train / airport, 11hrs flight and another 2hrs commuting time on Sunday 19th I made it from London to Santa Clara. Practically exhausted I checked in, targeting a comfy hotel bed only to end up on a 1.5 hrs drive to Monterey with three good friends / colleagues! It was a great start [...]

Now that MySQL 5.4 (internally code named performance version or summit) is officially released, I can tell you that I used MySQL 5.4 alpha for my Nehalem scaling studies in my earlier blog - MySQL Scalability on Nehalem systems (Sun Fire X4270). I am waiting to get hold of a 4 socket Nehalem system to see we scale; but that will have to wait for the MySQL conference to get over.

Allan managed to get slightly higher Sysbench Read-Only numbers than mine using the latest MySQL 5.4. Interestingly Solaris does better than Linux. Probably a bug since many of the optimizations in MySQL 5.4 are OS independent. But then a lot can happen in 12 months

Now that MySQL 5.4 (internally code named performance version or summit) is officially released, I can tell you that I used MySQL 5.4 alpha for my Nehalem scaling studies in my earlier blog - MySQL Scalability on Nehalem systems (Sun Fire X4270). I am waiting to get hold of a 4 socket Nehalem system to see we scale; but that will have to wait for the MySQL conference to get over.

Allan managed to get slightly higher Sysbench Read-Only numbers than mine using the latest MySQL 5.4. Interestingly Solaris does better than Linux. Probably a bug since many of the optimizations in MySQL 5.4 are OS independent. But then a lot can happen in 12 months

The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 in Santa Clara is now in full swing and Karen Padir just gave the opening keynote, talking about Sun's continued and improved commitment to Open Source and the upcoming MySQL products like the MySQL 5.4 performance release or MySQL Cluster 7.0. One of the activities that she mentioned in her keynote is our ongoing activity to improve the acceptance and incorporation of patches contributed by the community.

We've scheduled a BoF about this topic tonight …

I am very excited to be able to link to this press release announcing that The Pythian Group is the founding partner in MySQL’s brand-new “Remote DBA Provider” partnership program. This is great news for Pythian. It is also good news for Sun/MySQL. (Although admittedly nowhere near as attention-getting as Oracle’s announcement of their purchase [...]

Over the last year there has been alot of work done to instrument MySQL with static dtrace probes. The mysql provider first became available in MySQL 6.0.8 but required a build with the --enable-dtrace flag to enable it. Starting with MySQL 5.4 the mysql provider and it's static probes are now enabled by default and ready to be used on Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and Mac OS X.

The static probes in MySQL 5.4 have been designed to follow the execution path of a query

with the level getting deeper as the query execution proceeds. However the probes are implemented so that you don't have to traverse the entire hierarchy to get the information you want.

They are also implemented in sets. The -start probe exposes pertinent information such as the query text. The -done probe returns the status of the probe operation. With probe sets time spent within an operation can be captured.

Check out MC Brown's …

Forget to say, I've also tested PostgreSQL 8.3.7 during the last benchmark serie with dbSTRESS!

A big surprise - if two years ago on the same workload PostgreSQL was two times faster (see: http://dimitrik.free.fr/db_STRESS_BMK_Part2_ZFS.html ), now it's MySQL 5.4 outperforming PostgreSQL!

• Read-Only workload: MySQL is near two times faster now! (13.500 TPS vs ~7.000 TPS for PostgreSQL)
  
  
• Read+Write workload: MySQL performs as well or better (7.000-8.000 TPS vs 6.000-7.000 TPS for PostgreSQL)

For more details: http://dimitrik.free.fr/db_STRESS_MySQL_540_and_others_Apr2009.html#note_5443

As part of MySQL Cluster 7.0, an existing white paper has been brought up to date and extended. If you’re considering evaluating MySQL Cluster or are in the process of an evaluation then I’d strongly recommend reading this paper. Even if you haven’t got that far in your database evaluation, it’s worth taking a look as it describes both where the database excels and situations where it may be less suitable or where extra attention would be needed.

The MySQL Cluster Evaluation Guide can be downloaded from the mysql.com site.

MySQL Cluster Architecture

The purpose of the guide is to present …

MySQL (part of Sun Microsystems) have just announced the release of MySQL Cluster 7.0. This is a major new version of the database.

The highlights of the release (as well as an overview of the MySQL Cluster architecture) have been published in a new white paper: MySQL Cluster 7.0: Architecture and New Features.

For those in a rush, here are the highlights of the highlights:

• Multi-threaded data nodes. Could previously exploit up to 2 cores/CPUs/threads for a single data node. This is extended to 8 cores by introducing a multi-threaded version of the ndb process. This delivers a very significant performance improvement if running on a host with more than  a dual core.
• On-line add node. The ability to add a new node group to an in-service …