My previous post was an introduction to the TokuDB storage engine and aimed at explaining the basics of its design and how it differentiates from InnoDB/XtraDB. This post is all about motivating you to give it a try and have a look for yourself. Percona Server is not officially supporting TokuDB as of today, though the guys in the development team are working hard on this and the first GA release of Percona Server with TokuDB is looming on the horizon. However, there’s a beta version available now. For the installation tests in this post I’ve used the latest version of Percona Server alongside the accompanying TokuDB complement, which was published last week.

Installing Percona Server with TokuDB on a sandbox

One of the tools Percona Support Engineers really love is Giuseppe Maxia’s MySQL Sandbox. It allows us to setup a sandbox running a MySQL instance of our choice and makes executing multiple ones for testing purposes very easily. Whenever a customer reaches us with a problem happening on a particular version of MySQL or Percona Server that we can reproduce, we quickly spin off a new sandbox and test it ourselves, so it’s very handy. I’ll use one here to explore this beta version of Percona Server with TokuDB but if you prefer you can install it the regular way using a package from our apt experimental or yum testing repositories.

We start by downloading the tarballs from here: TokuDB’s plugin has been packaged in its own tarball, so there are two to download. Once you get them let’s decompress both and create a unified working directory, compressing it again to create a single tarball we’ll use as source to create our sandbox:

Before going ahead, verify if you have transparent huge pages enabled as TokuDB won’t run if it is set. See this documentation page for explanation on what this is and how to disable it on Ubuntu. In my CentOS test server it was defined in a slightly different place and I’ve done the following to temporarily disable it:

We’re now ready to create our sandbox. The following command should be enough (I’ve chosen to run Percona Server on port 5617, you can use any other available one):

If the creation process goes well you will see something like the following at the end:

You should now be able to access the MySQL console on the sandbox with the default credentials; if you cannot, verify the log-in $HOME/sandboxes/tokudb/data/msandbox.err:

Alternatively, you can make use of the “use” script located inside the sandbox directory, which employs the same credentials (configured in the client section of the configuration file my.sandbox.cnf):

First thing to check is if TokuDB is being listed as an available storage engine:

If that’s not the case, you may need to load the plugins manually – I had to do so in my sandbox; you may not need if you’re installing it from a package in a fresh setup:

TokuDB should now figure in the list of supported ENGINES but you still need to activate the related plugins:

Please note the INSTALL PLUGIN action results in permanent changes and thus is required only once. No modifications to MySQL’s configuration file are required to have those plugins load in subsequent server restarts.

Now you should see not only the main TokuDB plugin but also the add-ons to the INFORMATION SCHEMA:

We are now ready to create our first TokuDB table – the only different thing to do here is to specify TokuDB as the storage engine to use:

Note some unfamiliar files lying in the datadir; the details surrounding those is certainly good material for future posts:

Configuration: what’s really important

As noted by Vadim long ago, “Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there’re only a few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box things running pretty well“:

The most important of the tokudb_ variables is arguably tokudb_cache_size. The test server where I ran those tests (test01) have a little less than 1G of memory and as you can see above TokuDB is “reserving” half (50%) of them to itself. That’s the default behavior but, of course, you can change it. And you must do it if you are also going to have InnoDB tables on your server – you should not overcommit memory between InnoDB and TokuDB engines. Shlomi Noach wrote a good post explaining the main TokuDB-specific variables and what they do. It’s definitely a worth read.

I hope you have fun testing Percona Server with TokuDB! If you run into any problems worth reporting, please let us know.

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Peter Zaitsev

Fernando,

I see you’re disabling transparent huge pages. What is significance of this and why is it needed ?

thearhar

Got error 1 from storage engine on first INSTALL PLUGIN command, how to debug/fix?