In the last couple of weeks, there have been a few blog posts about benchmarks comparing the performance of various versions of MySQL and variants such as MariaDB. There’s also been some analysis of the results using formal models such as Neil Gunther’s Universal Scalability Law.
What can the Universal Scalability Law (USL) teach us about the performance characteristics of these systems, as revealed by the benchmarks? To find out, I’ll examine one particular benchmark, MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware.