MySQL Performance Blog

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week on Velocity Conference It was
quite interesting event worth attending and it was very good to see
the problems in this are going beyond Apache, PHP, Memcache and MySQL.

A lot of talks on this conference was focusing on what is called
“FrontEnd”. The meaning of Frontend is not the frontend web server
commonly used in many architectures but rather optimization on the
client side - how to make a browser to do less requests, make them
parallel, fetch less data and execute client side code faster.
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I should have written about it a while ago but I never had a change.
I’m speaking at Velocity conference taking place in the Bay Area 23-24 of June.

At the same conference we will have a book signing event for our book High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition which is finally in printing and should start shipping next week.

Quite frequently I would log in to customers system and find MySQL using too much memory. I would look at memory consumed by Innodb (it is often higher than innodb_buffer_pool_size) substract memory used by other global buffers such as query_cache_size and key_buffer and will in many cases see some mysterous memory which I can’t really explain. It can be several Gigabytes accounting for over 50% of memory usage of MySQL in some cases, though typically it is much smaller fraction.
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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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