High availability for MySQL has become increasingly relevant given the ever increasing rate of adoption and implementation. It’s no secret to anyone in the community that the popularity of MySQL has become noteworthy. I still remember my start with MySQL in the early 5.0 days and people told me that I may not want to consider wasting my time training on a database that didn’t have a large industry adoption, but look at where we are now! One of my favorite pages to cite when trying to exhibit this fact is the db-engines.com ranking trend page where we can see that MySQL is right up there and contending with enterprise products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

MySQL has gone from being part of the ever famous LAMP stack for users looking to set up their first website to seeing adoption from major technical players such as …

Ever since MySQL replication has existed, people have dreamed of a good solution to automatically split read from write operations, sending the writes to the MySQL master and load balancing the reads over a set of MySQL slaves. While if at first it seems easy to solve, the reality is far more complex.

First, the tool needs to make sure it parses and analyses correctly all the forms of SQL MySQL supports in order to sort writes from reads, something that is not as easy as it seems. Second, it needs to take into account if a session is in a transaction or not.

While in a transaction, the default transaction isolation level in InnoDB, Repeatable-read, and the MVCC framework insure that you’ll get a consistent view for the duration of the transaction. That means all statements executed inside a transaction must run on the master but, when the transaction commits or rollbacks, the following select statements on the session can be again …

ScaleArc hired Percona to benchmark failover times for the ScaleArc database traffic management software in different scenarios. We tested failover times for various clustered setups, where ScaleArc itself was the load balancer for the cluster. These tests complement other performance tests on the ScaleArc software – sysbench testing for latency and testing for WordPress acceleration.

We tested failover times for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and MHA (any traditional MySQL replication-based solution works pretty much the same way).

In each case, we tested failover with a rate limited …

ScaleArc recently hired Percona to perform various tests on its database traffic management product. This post is the outcome of the benchmarks carried out by me and ScaleArc co-founder and chief architect, Uday Sawant.

The goal of this benchmark was to identify ScaleArc’s overhead using a real-world application – the world’s most popular (according to wikipedia) content management system and blog engine: WordPress.

The tests also sought to identify the benefit of caching for this type of workload. The caching parameters represent more real-life circumstances than we applied in the sysbench performance tests – the goal here was not just to saturate the cache. For this reason, we created an artificial WordPress blog with generated data. …

ScaleArc recently hired Percona to perform various tests on its database traffic management product. This post is the outcome of the benchmarks carried out by Uday Sawant (ScaleArc) and myself. You can also download the report directly as a PDF here.

The goal of these benchmarks is to identify the potential overhead of the ScaleArc software itself and the potential benefits of caching. The benchmarks were carried out with the trunk version of sysbench. For this reason, we used a very small set of data, so the measurements will be fast, and it’s known that caching has huge benefits when the queries themselves are rather expensive. We decided that we would rather show that benefit with a real-world application, which is coming later is this series. And if you’re in the Silicon Valley area, be sure to join us this evening at the …

SAP on HANA. Funding for Guavus and ScaleArc. And more

It’s alive! @451research‘s 2013 Database survey is available now at bit.ly/451db13 #mysql #nosql #newsql #postgresql etc etc

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 9, 2013

#SAPonHANA is official. Read the press release for the SAP Business Suite powered by #SAP …