We’ve heard lots in recent years about Big Data and the alternative models of data management and processing, like Hadoop and NoSQL. But truth be told, relational databases are still the workhorses of most of today’s small and medium sized businesses. Relational DBs date back over 40 years and SQL skills are fairly common, and they’re known to be highly secure.

MySQL is the world’s second most popular relational database management system (RDMS) and is the most popular open-source version of the database. It’s easily accessible and is often known to be part of the LAMP web development stack, standing for the ‘M’ in the acronym of popular tools, along with Linux, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python. The fact that MySQL is free, easy to setup and scales fast are some of the main reasons why it’s the best match for many SMBs.

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MySQL performance can be increased in two ways, software optimization and hardware upgrades. While the previous articles have covered much of the software side of performance optimization, we are now going to focus on the hardware aspect. Does hardware help boost performance? Like software optimization, hardware upgrades for MySQL systems are based upon set goals for an organisation. The question is not what hardware would work best; rather a question of what hardware will help the organisation achieve an X goal. The answer is yes, hardware does boost performance, but there are a few caveats to this. There are cases such as organizations’ demands are fulfilled even with crappy hardware, and all they require is a performance boost on the software side. However, an organisation might have a goal plan for a major performance increase down the road, and …