The Solid State Storage Revolution: If you haven't seen it, I recommend you watch Andy Bechtolsheim's keynote at the recent Mysqlconf. We covered SSD's in our just published report on Big Data management technologies. Since then, we've gotten additional signals from our network of alpha geeks and our interest in them remains high.

R and Linked Data Streams: I had a chance to visit with Dataspora founder and blogger Mike Driscoll, an enthusiastic advocate for the use of the open source statistical computing …

As I described yesterday, Open Query is doing some tests on SSDs and other devices pretending to be harddisks (SANs, battery-backed RAID controllers, etc). To aid this, I wrote a small tool to test the different kind of I/O operations MySQL would/could do, which is not quite the same as what other general purpose apps would do, and also not what other test tools measure. For instance, it tries Direct I/O as well as fsync() after each write, and also it a range of different I/O block sizes.

In a nutshell, it’s aimed to do what MySQL does, without MySQL! Testing lots of different setups for this particular purpose (even with fantastic tools like MySQL Sandbox) is a complete pest, and changing InnoDB page size requires a recompile. While Percona has tried a larger page size in the past and decided it wasn’t worth it (the default is 16K), I thought it worthwhile to include …

Open Query too is exploring utilising SSDs in a MySQL infrastructure, but we wouldn’t be us if we didn’t also try some alternative perspective on it. Right now we’re running some comparative tests against various spinning HD setups in the same box, using the same controller, so we’re looking for differences rather than absolute speed.

The results so far are interesting, but the selection of SSDs we have available is limited (never enough toys!) So, a request: do you have an SSD, it’d be great if we could run our test tool on it for a bit. It won’t take long, but naturally the box shouldn’t be used for something else while the test is running. We can either log in remotely, or exchange code and results over email. Simply contact us through our site’s contact form, and we’ll sort things out! Thanks.

If you work for a vendor and would like to have your gear put …

Why should a performance engineer care about SSDs

There has a been lot of buzz regarding SSDs lately. SSDs change the dynamics of the IO subsystem. You are no longer limited by rotational latency and vibration effects. For a performance engineer this has many implications. Since performance engineers care mostly about performance, the first thought that comes to mind is "Are we going to see a big impact in benchmarks?".

The answer is really easy for IO bound benchmarks. How about CPU bound benchmarks? Many database benchmarks are CPU limited. Does a faster disk really change anything?

So what does an SSD really give you?

• Faster IOPS
• Decreased Latency for an IO

Faster IOPS

SSD's have a huge random IO capability. During a recent experiment with a SSD, I got around 12,000 random IO operations per second! I have seen SSDs where you can get more. If you have ever …

Why should a performance engineer care about SSDs

There has a been lot of buzz regarding SSDs lately. SSDs change the dynamics of the IO subsystem. You are no longer limited by rotational latency and vibration effects. For a performance engineer this has many implications. Since performance engineers care mostly about performance, the first thought that comes to mind is "Are we going to see a big impact in benchmarks?".

The answer is really easy for IO bound benchmarks. How about CPU bound benchmarks? Many database benchmarks are CPU limited. Does a faster disk really change anything?

So what does an SSD really give you?

• Faster IOPS
• Decreased Latency for an IO

Faster IOPS

SSD's have a huge random IO capability. During a recent experiment with a SSD, I got around 12,000 random IO operations per second! I have seen SSDs where you can get more. If you have ever …

Why should a performance engineer care about SSDs

There has a been lot of buzz regarding SSDs lately. SSDs change the dynamics of the IO subsystem. You are no longer limited by rotational latency and vibration effects. For a performance engineer this has many implications. Since performance engineers care mostly about performance, the first thought that comes to mind is "Are we going to see a big impact in benchmarks?".

The answer is really easy for IO bound benchmarks. How about CPU bound benchmarks? Many database benchmarks are CPU limited. Does a faster disk really change anything?

So what does an SSD really give you?

• Faster IOPS
• Decreased Latency for an IO

Faster IOPS

SSD's have a huge random IO capability. During a recent experiment with a SSD, I got around 12,000 random IO operations per second! I have seen SSDs where you can get more. If you have ever …

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 …

The Sun Fishworks guys were nice enough to invite me for a demo of their new 7000 series storage device.

We bang the heck out of our IO systems here at Spinn3r so having more options is always welcome.

Bryan Cantrill, one of the original DTrace developers, worked on this bad boy so there’s obviously going to be an emphasis on performance analysis.

This is one of the main competitive advantages of the 7000 series.

Out of the box you have a full admin console for performance tuning. It doesn’t stop at just raw IOs because they’ve instrumented it with a bunch of dtrace scripts.

You can view IOPS per file, CPU, make runtime tuning and configuration changes. Basically, the entire …

I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with Jonas
Oreland today (he also blogged about it on his blog at
http://jonasoreland.blogspot.com).

There is a lot of interesting features coming up in MySQL Cluster
version 6.4. Online Add Node is one of those, which can be done
without any downtime and even with almost no additional memory
needed other than the memory in the new machines added into the
cluster. This is a feature I started thinking almost 10 years ago
so it's nice to see the fourth version of the solution actually be
implemented and it's a really neat solution to the problem,
definitely fitting the word innovative.

The next interesting feature is to use a more efficient protocol
for handling large operations towards the data nodes. This makes it
use less bits …

A compilation of today's news of interest: