Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance some people have assumed that it is only a matter of time before MariaDB becomes the de facto replacement for MySQL.

That assumes that Oracle will allow the development of MySQL to stagnate, either deliberately or through neglect - something that we have expressed our doubts about, but even if that were the case it appears that the GPL (or more to the point MySQL’s dual licensing strategy) may restrict the potential for MariaDB.

Curt Monash recently raised the question of whether closed-source storage engines can be used with MySQL (and, by …

Following on the heels of our memcached performance tests on SunFire X2270 ( Sun's Nehalem-based server) running OpenSolaris, we ran the same tests on the same server but this time on RHEL5. As mentioned in the post presenting the first memcached results, a 10GBE Intel Oplin card was used in order to achieve the high throughput rates possible with these servers. It turned out that using this card on linux involved a bit of work resulting in driver and kernel re-builds.

• With the default ixgbe driver from the RedHat distribution (version 1.3.30-k2 on kernel 2.6.18)), the interface simply hung during the benchmark test.
• This led to downloading the driver from the Intel site (1.3.56.11-2-NAPI) and re-compiling it. This version …

Following on the heels of our memcached performance tests on SunFire X2270 ( Sun's Nehalem-based server) running OpenSolaris, we ran the same tests on the same server but this time on RHEL5. As mentioned in the post presenting the first memcached results, a 10GBE Intel Oplin card was used in order to achieve the high throughput rates possible with these servers. It turned out that using this card on linux involved a bit of work resulting in driver and kernel re-builds.

• With the default ixgbe driver from the RedHat distribution (version 1.3.30-k2 on kernel 2.6.18)), the interface simply hung during the benchmark test.
• This led to downloading the driver from the Intel site (1.3.56.11-2-NAPI) and re-compiling it. This version …

So lets test some different configurations and try and build some best practices around Multiple SSD’s:

Which is better? Raid 5 or Raid 10?

As with regular disks, Raid 10 seems to performance better ( accept for pure reads ).  I did get a lot of movement test to test like with the 67% read test -vs- the 75% or 80% tests. But all in all RAID 10 seemed to be the optimal config.

Should you enable the controller cache? One of the things I have found in my single drive tests is that “dumb” controllers tend to give better performance numbers then “smart” controllers. Really expensive controllers tend to have extra logic to compensate for the limitations of traditional disk. So I decided to play with some of the controller options. The obvious one is cache on the controller.

Some tests showed substantially better performance when the disk cache was disabled ( both read & write ).

If better …

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

Everyone loves SSD.  It’s a hot topic all around the MySQL community with vendors lining up all kinds of new solutions to attack the “disk io”  problem that has plagued us all for years and years.  At this year’s user conference I talked about SSD’s and MySQL.   Those who follow my blog know I love IO and I love to benchmark anything that can help overcome IO issues.  One of the most exciting things out their at this point are the Intel x-25e drives.  These bad boys are not only fast but relatively inexpensive.  How fast are they?  Let’s just do a quick bit of review here and peak at the single drive #’s from sysbench.    Here you can see that a single X25-e outperforms all my other single drive test.

Yep you have probably seen this type of chart on other sites…   The great thing about the Intel drives is their performance on writes, this difference gives …

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors - Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital - no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to acquire the other without shared investors).

When examining the open source vendor landscape it is tempting to imagine that the combined total could be bigger than the sum of its parts - that a combination of many open source product specialists could mount a challenge to Red Hat and Sun to claim the title of biggest open source software vendor.

Benchmark and Accel are among …

The MySQL Workbench team would like to announce the availability of the first Alpha release of MySQL Workbench 5.2.

The major new feature in MySQL Workbench 5.2 is the SQL IDE, which offers the ability to edit and execute queries on MySQL servers. The new SQL query editor, based on the Open Source Scintilla text editor component, offers full syntax highlighting and other advanced editing features. The SQL editor was also extended to perform live syntax checking, detecting and indicating any syntax errors in your SQL code even before executing them. The IDE also provides ability to browse and edit the contents of individual table rows.

Note, however, that as this is a development version, there are known and unknown issues that might prevent the smooth use of the application. Backup your models often and before opening them with this version as the file format has …

One of the things that has always bothered me about replication is that the binary logs are written to disk and then read from disk.

There is are two threads which are for the most part, unaware of each other.

One thread reads the remote binary logs, and the other writes them to disk.

While the Linux page buffer CAN work to buffer these logs, the first write will cause additional disk load.

One strategy, which could seriously boost performance in some situations, would be to pre-read say 10-50MB of data and just keep it in memory.

If a slave is catching up, it could have GIGABYTES of binary log data from the master. It would then write this to disk. These reads would then NOT come from cache.

Simply using a small buffer could solve this problem.

One HACK would be to use a ram drive or tmpfs for logs. I assume that the log thread will block if the disk fills up… if it does so …

At MySQL Conference and Expo 2009, I explained how Linux I/O scheduler queue size affects MyISAM insert performance.

It is well known that Linux implemented four types of I/O schedulers (noop/deadline/anticipatory/cfq) in Linux kernel 2.6.10. The default is cfq in most distributions including RHEL, which is not so good then noop normally outperforms, but I'll talk this in other posts.

Linux I/O scheduler also has a functionality to sort incoming I/O requests in its request-queue for optimization. Queue size is configurable. Queue size is defined as "/sys/block/sdX/queue/nr_requests" then you can change queue length as follows.

# cat /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests
128
# echo 100000 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests

Changing queue size is even effective for noop …