May 24, 2013

Should I buy a Fast SSD or more memory?

While a scale-out solution has traditionally been popular for MySQL, it’s interesting to see what room we now have to scale up – cheap memory, fast storage, better power efficiency.  There certainly are a lot of options now – I’ve been meeting about a customer/week using Fusion-IO cards.  One interesting choice I’ve seen people make [...]

Star Schema Bechmark: InfoBright, InfiniDB and LucidDB

In my previous rounds with DataWarehouse oriented engines I used single table without joins, and with small (as for DW) datasize (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/). Addressing these issues, I took Star Schema Benchmark, which is TPC-H modification, and tried run queries against InfoBright, InfiniDB, LucidDB and MonetDB. I did not get results for MonetDB, will [...]

Why you don’t want to shard.

Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.

The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.

So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.

Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons

XtraDB/InnoDB CPU bound benchmarks on 24cores server

One of our customers gave me a chance to run some benchmarks on 24-core (intel cpu based) server, and I could not miss it and ran few CPU-bound tasks there. The goal of benchmarks was investigation of InnoDB-plugin and XtraDB scalability in CPU-bound load.

128GB or RAM finally got cheap

I did not usually go to “Elite” servers on Dell web site but looking at customers system today I went to check Dell Poweredge R900. This monster takes up to 4 Quad Core CPUs and has 32 memory slots, which allows to get 128GB of memory with 4GB of memory chips. This means upgrade to [...]

The #1 mistake hosting providers make for MySQL servers

This article is not meant to malign hosting providers, but I want to point out something you should be aware of if you’re getting someone else to build and host your servers for you. Most hosting providers — even the big names — continue to install 32-bit GNU/Linux operating systems on 64-bit hardware. This is [...]

Real-Life Use Case for “Barracuda” InnoDB File Format

In one of his recent posts Vadim already gave some information about possible benefits from using new InnoDB file format but in this post I’d like to share some real-life example how compression in InnoDB plugin could be useful for large warehousing tasks.

Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL Needs

I’m often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I’ve decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the [...]

Falcon Storage Engine Design Review

Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]