The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

It was a very long time since I wrote something in this blob, but I have been very busy this spring with MariaDB on Power mostly. This has been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. So, what is this MariaDB on Power thing all about, well I wrote an introduction to the Power platform late last year. Since then a lot of things has happened though.

One thing is that several service providers out there has adopted Power8 as a platform. To be honest, this really isn't sexy, but it is useful and as a user of one of these services, you will just see the same old Linux you are used to, but potentially it is more powerful and reliable. One such provider is OVH, whose service is more known as RunAbove. If you want to try it, you can do so for free for 7 7 days, just go …

While playing with MySQL 5.7.5 on POWER8, I came across a rather interesting bug (74775 – and this is not the only one… I think I have a decent amount of auditing and patching to do now) which made me want to write a bit on memory barriers and the volatile keyword.

Memory barriers are hard.

Like, super hard. It’s the kind of thing that makes you curse hardware designers, probably because they’re not magically solving all your problems for you. Basically, as you get more CPU cores and each of them have caches, it gets more expensive to keep everything in sync. It’s quite obvious that with *ahem* an eventually consistent model, you could save a bunch of time and effort at the expense of shifting some complexity into software.

Those in the MySQL world should recognize this – we’ve been dealing with asynchronous replication for well over a decade …

Good news for those wanting to run MariaDB on POWER systems, the latest 10.0 bzr tree (as of a couple of weeks ago) builds and runs well!

I recently pulled the latest MariaDB 10.0 from BZR and built it on a POWER8 system in the lab to run some quick tests. The MariaDB team has done some work on getting MariaDB to run on POWER recently, a bunch of which is based off my work on MySQL on POWER.

There’s obviously still some work in progress going on, but my initial results show performance within around 10% of MySQL, so with a bit of work we will hopefully see MariaDB reach performance parity.

One interesting find was the code to account for thread memory usage uses a single atomic variable: this does not scale and does end up showing up on profiles.

I’ll comment more on the code in a future post, but it looks like we will have MariaDB being functional on POWER in an upcoming release.

It’s been a little while since I blogged on MySQL on POWER (last time was thinking that new releases would be much better for running on POWER). Well, I recently grabbed the MySQL 5.6.20 source tarball and had a go with it on a POWER8 system in the lab. There is good news: I now only need one patch to have it function pretty flawlessly (no crashes). Unfortunately, there’s still a bit of an odd thing with some of the InnoDB mutex code (bug filed at some point soon).

But, with this one patch applied, I was getting okay sysbench results and things are looking good.

Now just to hope the MySQL team applies my other patches that improve things on POWER. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed many of them have sat there for this long… it doesn’t help build a development community when patches can sit for months without either …

About 1.5 months ago I blogged on MySQL 5.6 on POWER andtalked about what I had to poke at to make modern MySQL versions run and run well on shiny POWER8 systems.

One of those bugs, MySQL bug 47213 (InnoDB mutex/rw_lock should be conscious of memory ordering other than Intel) was recently marked as CLOSED by the Oracle MySQL team and the upcoming 5.6.20 and 5.7.5 releases should have the fix!

This is excellent news for those wanting to run MySQL on SMP systems that don’t have an Intel-like memory model (e.g. POWER and MIPS64).

This was the most major and invasive patch in the patchset for MySQL on POWER. It’s absolutely fantastic that this has made it into 5.6.20 and 5.7.5 and may mean that these new …

I’ve previously covered MySQL 5.6 on POWER (with patch), MySQL 5.6 Performance on POWER8 (spoiler: new performance record) and MySQL 5.7 on POWER.

Of course, The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. Also, these numbers should be considered preliminary, but trust me – I did get them and it’s not April 1st.

From my last post, you saw that with my preliminary patch for MySQL 5.7 to work on POWER, we could easily match the previous record for sysbench point select …

In a previous post, I covered porting MySQL 5.6 to POWER and subsequently, some new record performance numbers with MySQL 5.6.17 on POWER8.

Well, those following at home will be aware that not only is the next sentence sponsored by IBM Legal, but that MySQL 5.7 alleviates a bunch of the mutex contention that we saw with MySQL 5.6. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In looking at MySQL performance on POWER, it’s inevitable that I should look at MySQL 5.7 and what’s coming up in the next stable release of MySQL.

Surprisingly, a bunch of the core code in InnoDB and MySQL dealing with mutexes has changed in MySQL 5.7 when …

The following sentence is brought to you by IBM Legal. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Okay, now that is out of the way….

If you’re the kind of person who follows the MySQL bugs database closely or subscribes to the MySQL Internals mailing list, you may have worked out that I’ve spent a small amount of time poking at MySQL on modern POWER systems.

Unlike Intel CPUs, POWER CPUs require explicit memory barriers to synchronize memory state between different CPUs. This means that when you’re implementing synchronization primitives, you have one extra thing to get …

As many of you know, I’ve been working in the MySQL world for quite a while now. IN fact, it was nearly 10 years ago when I first started hacking on MySQL Cluster at MySQL AB.

Most recently, I was at Percona which was a wonderful journey where over my nearly three years there the company at least doubled in size, launched several new software products and greatly improved the quality and frequency of releases.

However the time has come for something completely different. The MySQL world is rather mature, the future of …