May 18, 2013

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

Virident tachIOn: New player on Flash PCI-E cards market

(Note: The review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) In my talk on MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 “An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases” I mentioned that most likely there are other players coming soon. I actually was not aware about any real [...]

Maatkit Now Supports Memcached

Have you ever wondered how optimized your Memcached installation is? There is a common misconception that one doesn’t have to think too deeply about Memcached performance, but that is not true. If your setup is inefficient, you could: Burn Memory Waste Network Round-Trips Store Keys That Never Get Retrieved Have a Low Cache Hit Ratio [...]

RAID vs SSD vs FusionIO

In benchmarks passion (see my two previous posts) I managed to setup all three devices (RAID was on board; Intel X25-E SSD connected to HighPoint controller, FusionIO card) on our working horse Dell PowerEdge R900 (btw, to do that I had to switch from CentOS 5.2 to Ubuntu 8.10, as CentOS was not able to [...]