The idea to use SSD/Flash as a cache is not new, and there are different solutions for this, both OpenSource like L2ARC for ZFS and Flashcache from Facebook, and proprietary, like directCache from Fusion-io. They all however have some limitations, that’s why I am considering to have L2 cache on a database level, as an [...]
Level 2 Flash cache is there
As I mentioned in my talk An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases I see in the near and middle term future a lot of interest for using Flash storage in Level 2 caching level. The price-capacity trade-off makes Flash as the very good fit for a cache layer. Actually it is not the new [...]
Effect of adaptive_flushing
I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]
Making replication a bit more reliable
Running MySQL slave is quite common and regular task which we do every day, taking backups from slave is often recommended solution. However the current state of MySQL replication makes restoring slave a bit tricky (if possible at all). The main problem is that InnoDB transaction state and replication state are not synchronized. If we [...]
New SpecJAppServer results at MySQL and Sun.
As you likely have seen Sun has posted the new SpecJAppServer Results More information from Tom Daly can be found here These results are quite interesting for me as I worked on some of the previous SpecJAppServer Benchmarks several years ago while being employed by MySQL. These are great results, plus they can be relevant [...]
Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers
So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]

