With data volumes and user populations growing, its no wonder that database performance is a hot topic in developer and DBA circles.  

Its also no surprise that continued performance improvements were one of the top design goals of the new MySQL 5.6 release which was declared GA on February 5th (note: GA means “Generally Available”, not “Gypsy Approved” @mysqlborat)

And the performance gains haven’t disappointed:

- Dimitri Kravtchuk’s Sysbench tests showed MySQL delivering up to 4x higher performance than the previous 5.5 release.

- Mikael Ronstrom’s testing showed up to 4x better scalability as thread counts rose to 48 and 60 …

The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6.

As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to:

· Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data)

· Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog)

The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application …

At OSCON 2011 last week, Oracle delivered more early access (labs) features for MySQL 5.6 replication. These features are focused on better integration, performance and data integrity:

- The Binlog API: empowering the community to seamlessly integrate MySQL with other applications and data stores;

- Binlog Group Commit and Enhanced Multi-Threaded Slaves: continuing to deliver major improvements to replication performance;

- Durable Slave Reads: further enhancing data integrity.

These new features build on the significant replication enhancements announced as part of the MySQL 5.6.2 Development Milestone Release back in April.

We are always listening to our customers and community. And, based on their needs and input, the MySQL engineering team continues to take …

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...

We have just published Andrei's first version of the multi-threaded slave as a preview release.

Currently, the master produce a load by concurrent multiple client connections while the single slave thread execute replication events one by one. In some scenarios, this causes the slave to lag behind the master.

With the multi-threaded slave work, the replication slave will scale on multi-core machines.

This is a very early preview with serious limitations. Even so, please feel free to try it out and let us know what you think.

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/ReplicationFeatures/ParallelSlave

We've been running replication poll and we've got some answers, so I thought I would comment a little on the results of the poll and what our future plans with respect to replication is as a result of the feedback. As I commented in the previous post, there are some items that require a significant development effort, but the feedback we got helps us to prioritize.

The top five items from the poll above stands out, so I thought that I would comment on each of them in turn. The results of the poll were (when this post were written):