Reading Barons post about Kickfire Appliance and of course talking to them directly I learned a lot in their product is about beating data processing limitations of current systems. This raises valid question how fast can MySQL process (filter) data using it current architecture ? I decided to test the most simple case – what [...]
MySQL Performance on Memory Appliance
Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on “Memory Appliance” by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system. I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon [...]
Predicting how long data load would take
I had this question asked many times during last week, and there is really no easy answer. There are just way too many variables to consider especially while loading large schemas with a lot of different table structures. So which variables affect the load speed: Table Structure This one is tricky. The shorter rows you [...]
To UUID or not to UUID ?
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Trying Archive Storage Engine
Today I noticed one of server used for web request profiling stats logging is taking about 2GB per day for logs, which are written in MyISAM table without indexes. So I thought it is great to try how much archive storage engine could help me in this case.
Cache Performance Comparison
Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?
If you’ve been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions [...]
Join performance of MyISAM and Innodb
We had discussion today which involved benchmarks of Join speed for MyISAM and Innodb storage engines for CPU bound workload, this is when data size is small enough to fit in memory and so buffer pool. I tested very simple table, having with about 20.000 rows in it on 32bit Linux. The columns “id” “i” [...]
Group commit and real fsync
During the recent months I’ve seen few cases of customers upgrading to MySQL 5.0 and having serious performance slow downs, up to 10 times in certain cases. What was the most surprising for them is the problem was hardware and even OS specific – it could show up with one OS version but not in [...]

