MySQL Performance Blog

Looking at Kaj’s Blog Annoucement MySQL has pulled back on the plans to release portions of the servers as close Source only.

I am extremely happy to hear these news ! This is good for MySQL as a company, MySQL customers and MySQL users.

I’m hoping Community feedback was serious contributer to this decision, though I know there were a lot of Internal discussions as well. In any case this sends a great message to community - Speak up and you may be heard.

I also hope Marten Mickos took this decision being convinced rather than getting the order from the top as this is only one battle in “what is going to be opensource” war

Anyway thank you everyone who made this happen, in particularly Monty, which I know fought a lot for this.

P.S. This is great news but I’d like to see and know more. Looks like servers is left alone being Open Source, what is about MySQL WorkBench, MySQL Proxy Extensions, MySQL Monitoring software ?

If you’ve missed our presentations on MySQL Users Conference you can catch up now by taking a look at the slides, which are now published in presentations section of our company web site. You can also find a lot of old presentations in the same location.

Enjoy !

I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can’t say I agree on all points.
First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying “You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many systems they have” on MySQL UC2008 Scalability Panel ? Indeed disks MAY be the most important part in your system performance or it may not be. Different people get to deal with different systems and so acquire different feeling about percentage of cases when disk would be the problem.
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Friday after MySQL Users Conference we had a smaller meeting at Google campus to talk about MySQL architecture mainly focusing on storage engine vendors and other extension areas.
It was very interesting to see all these storage engine interface extensions which are planned for MySQL 6.0 and beyond - abilities to intercept query execution or offloading query fragments and operations (sorting limit etc) in the storage engines. This is great news as this would allow to build really innovative storage engines with MySQL which was previously hard because of defined row by row retrieval interface and nested loops used for joins.

However what stroke me is a thought - This thing is really getting complicated. Few years ago Marten would frequently mention Oracle (and other commercial databases) as complicated beasts being overkill for most of their users.
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If you’re following PlanetMySQL you’ve already seen Baron’s post about MySQL Conference which many of us just have returned from.
It was great event as well as 5 conferences I’ve been before that, though however it more and more becomes MySQL marketing channel and business event rather than Users Conference as it originated. This Year even name was changed to be MySQL Conference and Expo though I have not noticed it until Baron pointed out
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MySQL Users Conference 2008 has number of Storage Engines presented which claim to Kick Ass. Walking in exhibition hall you could see KickFire, Infobright, Tokutek, ScaleDB. I have not seen NitroDB in the exhibition call this year but they are also worth to mention.
It is interesting to see all of them showing benchmarks with great numbers and glossy marketing materials explaining why they are better.

I’ve seen enough of marketing benchmarks at my life to really believe them. Marketing benchmarks typically show the cases when product excels but leaving limitations and cases when product does not work well and shows sub par results - and these cases always exist. Making decisions in software design you often have to made tradeoffs which makes it especially hard to get a product which performs best for ALL cases, and keep in mind performance is not the only thing you may be concerned about.
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On Monday I had a chance to have a chat with Paul Vallee from Pythian. This was quite an enlightening talk, and I was very impressed by Paul openness and willing to share with me a lot of internal operations details. I wish there would be more people out where as open and helpful even when it comes to somewhat competing businesses. Though he is of course right - for small companies as we are there is much more business out where which is neither ours nor theirs and by being helpful to each other we can increase part of the pie to share.

Paul has significantly older (10 years) and larger (70 people) company so he has a lot to share. They have great internal systems and there is a lot we can learn from them in this area. We do fine with ours so far having just 7 active consultants but as we grow we need to get much better.
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As you probably have already heard Innodb Announced new Plugin version for MySQL 5.1 So now you can see Heikki and the Team were not just doing only bug fixes for last two years, but rather kept very quite.

We had access to this code for few weeks and should say we were impressed in quality (we found only one crash bug which was fixed in less than 24 hours) as well as performance improvements to compression and fast index build functionality. As it is now publicly released we’ll try to put it to some production slaves to see how well it works.
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Reading evening news and rss feeds I found interesting next sequence:

Jeremy’s post “MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise“

basically about some new features of MySQL will be available only for paid customers

Then Kaj’s post Anthropology: Sun studies MySQL with tagline “Sun didn’t acquire MySQL to change it, but to learn from it”

And finally news Sun Tackles Video Codec with info “Sun is working on a royalty-free and open video codec and media system”

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Yesterday I had a chance to speak to Igor - head of MySQL optimizer team and Timur - both of them expressed concern with TPC-H run results I posted and notes about little gains in MySQL 6.0.

Do not get this post wrong. I’m not saying MySQL 6.0 SubQuery optimizations are non existent or priorities were wrong, what I’m saying is just they do not seems to be apply to most of TPC-H Queries. I personally (before doing what exactly queries are part of TPC-H) was expecting to see gains in TPC-H and I think this is what other users would expect as well because this is well known set of complex queries which use SubQueries.

So what is the reason ? Why TPC-H queries are not targeted ?
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