Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario? [...]
Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer
Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]
The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines
One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]
Why Swapping is bad for MySQL Performance ?
So you get MySQL or other applications using too much memory on the box or OS behaving funny and using more memory for cache and pushing application to the swap. This causes swapping and causes performance problems. This much is obvious. But how bad is it ? Should you count it same as normal Disk [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 2
Part 1 of our series set-up our “test” application and looked at boosting performance of the application by buffer MySQL with memcached. Our test application is simple and requires only 3 basic operations per transaction 2 reads and 1 write. Using memcached combined with MySQL we ended up nearly getting a 10X performance boost from [...]
Compression for InnoDB backup
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current multi-core word the compression utility should utilize several CPU to speedup operation, [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?
There are interesting posts these day about future of MySQL Replication by Brian Frank and Arjen. I think it very interesting to take a look at a bit bigger picture using framework from Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. I’m not going to speak about disruption and commoditisation of Database Market, leaving this for Market talks, [...]
MySQL: Data Storage or Data Processing
I was thinking today of how people tend to use MySQL in modern applications and it stroke me in many cases MySQL is not used to process the data, at least not on the large scale – instead it is used for data storage and light duty data retrieval. Even in this case however the [...]

