… an expedition to uncover (and fix) database performance issues!

© 2021 Tiago L. Alves. All rights reserved.

One of the worse things that can happen when upgrading to a newer database version is discovering that the performance is not as good as before. Despite the effort put into gate-keeping MySQL NDB Cluster’s strict performance requirements, one of our customers found a performance regression when upgrading from our 7.4 version to our 7.6 version. How did that happen when our automated performance test suite failed to show it? To answer that, and fix the issue we enrolled on a database performance archaeology expedition…

When your performance is not good enough

MySQL NDB Cluster is an open-source in-memory distributed database developed for high-availability (99.999% or more) and predictable query times. It can be found at the core of gaming, banking, telecommunication, and online services. …

Introduction As previously explained, you can run database integration tests 20 times faster! The trick is to map the data directory in memory, and my previous article showed you what changes you need to do when you have a PostgreSQL or MySQL instance on your machine. In this post, I’m going to expand the original … Continue reading How to run integration tests at warp speed using Docker and tmpfs →

Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we …