Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
InnoDB benchmarks
There was several changes in InnoDB to fix scalabilty problems, so I ran benchmark to check new results and also compare overall performance of InnoDB in 5.0 and 5.1 before and after fixes. Problems in InnoDB that were fixed: Thread trashing issues with count of theads 100+. In this case performance of InnoDB degraded dramatically. [...]
INSERT INTO … SELECT Performance with Innodb tables.
Everyone using Innodb tables probably got use to the fact Innodb tables perform non locking reads, meaning unless you use some modifiers such as LOCK IN SHARE MODE or FOR UPDATE, SELECT statements will not lock any rows while running. This is generally correct, however there a notable exception – INSERT INTO table1 SELECT * [...]

