I am giving a talk in a couple of weeks at the 2010 MySQL User Conference that will touch on use cases for NOSQL tools -vs- More relational tools, the talk is entitled “Choosing the Right Tools for the Job, SQL or NOSQL”. While this talk is NOT supposed to be a deep dive into the good, bad, and ugly of these solutions, rather a way to discuss potential use cases for various solutions and where they may make a lot of sense, being me I still felt a need to at least do some minor benchmarking of these solutions. The series of posts I wrote last year over on mysqlperformanceblog.com comparing Tokyo Tyrant to both MySQL and Memcached was fairly popular. In fact the initial set of benchmark scripts I used for that series actually has been put to good use since then testing out …

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS. The UK’s updated OSS strategy. And more.

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Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS
# Oracle’s MySQL strategy slide.

# eWeek reported that database thought leaders are divided on Oracle MySQL.

# Savio Rodrigues and Computerworld on Oracle’s plans for MySQL, other open source assets.

# Zack Urlocker is leaving Oracle/Sun/MySQL.

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I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here.

The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. We started it up with innodb_adaptive_flushing=OFF and innodb_doublewrite=OFF, then ramped up traffic and everything looked stable ... but I noticed one troubling thing: ~2GB of uncheckpointed data.

mysql> SHOW INNODB STATUS\G
....
Database pages      2318457
Old database pages  855816
Modified db pages   457902
Log flushed up to   10026890404067
Last checkpoint at  10024612103454
....

We enabled …

A while ago I started a project which will be heavily IO-bound on the MySQL Server, the testmachine allocated for this had a DAS with 15 disks (although I only used 14) connected via external SAS (standard 3Gb/s half-duplex or 6Gb/s full-duplex on two ports).

I used sysbench for the tests, both fileio and oltp, although these results will be based on the fileio results. The setup with the disks in RAID10 (7 raid 1 sets, then striping over them) and later RAID50 (2 raid 5 sets with 7 disks each, then striping over that), the latter yielding better results.

Let’s take a look at 1,2,4,8,16 and 128 concurrent clients, with different IO schedulers, although using XFS.
The config for the raid controller was write-back, cached access, advanced readahead. 512MB battery backed cache on the controller.

Also, I tested both sequential reading (SEQRD in the graphs) and random read/write (RNDRW in the graphs)

…

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 …

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 …

For the past two months, I have been running tests on TokuDB in my free time. TokuDB is a storage engine put out by Tokutek. TokuDB uses fractal tree indexes instead of B-tree indexes to improve performance, which is dramatically noticeable when dealing with large tables (over 100 million rows).

For those that like the information “above the fold”, here is a table with results from a test comparing InnoDB and TokuDB. All the steps are explained in the post below, if you want more details, but here’s the table: