On the 24th of November I attended a talk given by one of of Sun's benchmark specialists , Dimitri Kravtchuk, at the Sun Solution Center of Paris.

The talk was simply called MySQL performance, and I was expecting, as many I suppose (the auditorium was packed !) tips and tricks on how to optimize a MySQL database. However I was quite positively surprised since the 3 hours session wasn't just a long list of tricks and “how to's” but was actually a journey through one and a half year of improvement of the InnoDB engine.

InnoDB could easily scale horizontally but not vertically. Horizontal scaling is the fact to put many small servers with each running a MySQL server (typically in a Master-Slave mode) where vertical scaling would be to put a unique MySQL server on a bigger server, expecting to get better performances. The latter is more and more needed given the multiplication of cores and threads within the CPUs even in entry level …

On the 24th of November I attended a talk given by one of of Sun's benchmark specialists , Dimitri Kravtchuk, at the Sun Solution Center of Paris.

The talk was simply called MySQL performance, and I was expecting, as many I suppose (the auditorium was packed !) tips and tricks on how to optimize a MySQL database. However I was quite positively surprised since the 3 hours session wasn't just a long list of tricks and “how to's” but was actually a journey through one and a half year of improvement of the InnoDB engine.

InnoDB could easily scale horizontally but not vertically. Horizontal scaling is the fact to put many small servers with each running a MySQL server (typically in a Master-Slave mode) where vertical scaling would be to put a unique MySQL server on a bigger server, expecting to get better performances. The latter is more and more needed given the multiplication of cores and threads within the CPUs even in entry level …

After finishing my post on the Faban 1.0 announcement, I realized that it was geared towards users who were already using Faban. So I decided to write this post for users who have never used Faban.

Faban is two things :

1. A framework for developing performance and load tests.
2. A tool to run these tests and view their results.

The former is called the “Faban Driver Framework” and the latter is called the “Faban Harness”. Although the two are related, it is entirely possible to run an arbitrary test developed outside of Faban using the Faban Harness. In fact, many benchmarks do just that. In this respect, Faban is rather unique.

The Driver Framework

The real power of Faban is unleashed only when you use the framework. The framework …

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

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• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft

Dear interweb, if you have no idea what you’re writing about, keep it to yourself, don’t litter into the tubes. Some people may not notice they’re eating absolute crap and get diarrhea.

This particular benchmark has two favorite parts, that go with each other together really well:

I didnt change absolutely any parameters for the servers, eg didn’t change the innodb_buffer_pool_size or key_buffer_size.

And..

If you need speed just to fetch a data for a given combination or key, Redis is a solution that you need to look at. MySQL can no way compare to Redis and Memcache. …

Seriously, how does one repay for all the damage of such idiotic benchmarks?

P.S. I’ve ranted at benchmarks before, and will …

Faban 1.0 has just been released. This is a major milestone for this open-source workload creation and test framework. Faban is widely used by many performance geeks to performance test various types of server applications. Amongst open source tools, Faban is unique in that it not only provides a framework to create and run performance/load tests, but also has robust functionality to run monitoring tools. It collects all sorts of configuration information as well to truly help performance engineers keep track of configuration and tuning settings.

Here are some major new features in 1.0 which I think will make Faban a very attractive proposition (when compared to the likes of some very expensive proprietary tools).

Automated Form Generation

If you have used Faban before to create workloads, this is the feature you probably have been craving. But let me explain for …

With many thanks to Vadim at Percona for his analysis of different capabilities of different columnar dbms. Definitely good information, and well documented.  Queries and results available at:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/

Of course InfiniDB, does offer multi-threaded processing for all offerings and distributed prRead More...

With many thanks to Vadim at Percona for his analysis of different capabilities of different columnar dbms. Definitely good information, and well documented.  Queries and results available at:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/

Of course InfiniDB, does offer multi-threaded processing for all offerings and distributed processing (enabled with Enterprise Edition additional functionality) that was beyond the scope of hisRead More...

I‘ll be giving a webinar version of a well-received presentation from last year‘s Users Conference tomorrow (November 5th) at 10:00 AM Pacific that covers how to configure MySQL Connector/J to deliver the best performance for your Java application running on MySQL. The session is interactive, and we‘ll be answering questions, so bring those along!

Come spend your morning/afternoon break with me and learn a few new tricks for making your applications fly. The information to sign up is at https://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-460.html. Hope to see you there!

MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning Best Practices

Are you experiencing current performance bottlenecks in your high availability applications ? Are you designing a new mission-critical application and want to know how best to structure your schema and index strategy for optimal performance? Interested in how to transform your SQL into faster, more efficient queries?

Then this free web presentation is for you! You will get expert insight and learn best practices to help you identify those areas of database and application design that will give you the greatest benefits for performance when using MySQL Cluster.

We will discuss guidelines and best practices covering the following areas:

• General Design Concepts and Guidelines
• Schema Optimization
  • BLOB/Text vs VARBINARY/VARCHAR
  • Partition by Key
• Index Selection and Tuning
…