This blog aims to make a performance comparison between the different MySQL versions/editions and also comparing the differents MySQL forks such as Percona Server and MariaDB.  Indeed number of improvements as been done to innodb storage engine in the last MySQL versions. You can find below some of the performance improvements applied to InnoDB these last years (non exhaustive list):

MySQL 5.0

1. New compact storage format which can save up to 20% of the disk space required in previous MySQL/InnoDB versions.
2. Faster recovery from a failed or aborted ALTER TABLE.
3. Faster implementation of TRUNCATE TABLE.

MySQL 5.5

1. MySQL Enterprise Thread Pool, As of MySQL 5.5.16, MySQL Enterprise Edition distributions include a thread pool plugin that provides an alternative thread-handling model designed to reduce overhead and improve performance.
2. …

Today at the #ukoug_tech14 I had the chance to attend to the Christo Kutrovky's session @kutrovsky (Pythian) about "Measuring Performance in Oracle Solaris & Oracle Linux". This session aimed to present how to measure system utilization in the Linux and Oracle Solaris operating systems and how to use these information for tuning and capacity planning. During this session we had a very good introduction to a bunch of performance monitoring tools that can be categorized in four categories (non exhaustive list of tool):

1. CPU:

• top
• vmstat
• time
• mpstat

2. Memory - RAM

2.1 Global

• /proc/meminfo
• vmstat
• ipcs
…

Delayed Transaction Durability is a new SQL Server 2014 feature that was not included in SQl Server 2014 CTP1 but discreetly published in CTP2. It is a very interesting functionality that helps reducing the IO contention for transaction log writes.

In other databases engine, you will find equivalents such as:  

• Oracle: 'COMMIT WRITE BATCH WAIT|NOWAIT' (link here)
• MySQL: 'group_commit' since version 4.x (link here)
• PostgreSQL: 'group_commit' introduce in version 9.2 (link here)