This blog post discussed the advantages of SSDs over HDDs for database environments.

For years now, I’ve been telling audiences for my MySQL Performance talk the following: if you are running an I/O-intensive database on spinning disks you’re doing it wrong. But there are still a surprising number of laggards who aren’t embracing SSD storage (whether it’s for cost or reliability reasons).

Let’s look at cost first. As I write this now (September 2016), high-performance server-grade spinning hard drives run for about $240 for 600GB (or $0.40 per GB).  Of course, you can get an 8TB archive drive at about same price …

This blog post will detail the results of Samsung storage in

tpcc-mysql

 benchmark using Percona Server.

I had an opportunity to test different Samsung storage devices under tpcc-mysql benchmark powered by Percona Server 5.7. You can find a summary with details here https://github.com/Percona-Lab-results/201607-tpcc-samsung-storage/blob/master/summary-tpcc-samsung.md

I have in my possession:

• Samsung 850 Pro, 2TB: This is a SATA device and is positioned as consumer-oriented, something that you would use in a high-end user desktop. As of this post, I estimate the price of this device as around $430/TB.
• …

MEB 3.12.0 and above support cloud backup and restore using OpenStack-compatible object stores ("Swift"). This allows MySQL database users with Oracle Storage Cloud account to take backups and store them directly in the cloud and restore them from there.

The following steps illustrate how to set up and use MEB with Oracle Storage Cloud :

1) Create Oracle Storage Cloud account at https://cloud.oracle.com/storage . Once service gets activated, make a note of the following credentials that will be required in further steps :

• Username

• Password

• Identity domain name

• Service Instance Name : Customer-specified name of the service instance

…

dm-cache is (albeit still classified “experimental”) is in the just released Linux 3.9 kernel. It deals with generic block devices and uses the device mapper framework. While there have been a few other similar tools flying around, since this one has been adopted into the kernel it looks like this will be the one that you’ll be seeing the most in to the future. It saves sysadmins the hassle of compiling extra stuff for a system.

A typical use is for an SSD to cache a HDD. Similar to a battery backed RAID controller, the objective is to insulate the application from latency caused by the mechanical device, the most laggy part of which is seek time (measured in milliseconds). Giventhe  relatively high storage capacity of an SSD (in the hundreds of GBs), this allows you to mostly disregard the mechanical latency for writes and that’s very useful for database systems such as MariaDB.

That covers writes (for the moment), but …

We’ve all heard the term “Big Data” thrown around a fair amount in the last several years ever since the rise of Hadoop and other distributed storage methods. But defining “Big Data” has always been a subjective term that hinges on perspective; what one engineer considers big can be vastly different than another’s.

However, there’s finally a definite description that says Big Data no matter what perspective you operate from: “That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.” You can read more about the facility and its purpose here: …

I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).

Two …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

A while ago I had a discussion with someone about the future of server infrastructure. Among other things, we were wondering whether companies will continue to run on dedicated servers or if eventually everyone just ends up in a Cloud environment. During the discussion I raised a point that in principle Cloud is a great idea that will keep attracting more and more people, but it is missing one important piece that stops many from using it – a high performance storage. Apparently, this has just changed.

Yesterday I received an e-mail announcing a new EC2 instance type – hi1.4xlarge. It features 16 logical CPUs (35 ECUs), 60GB of RAM, and… two 1TB SSD-based disk volumes! These are great specs that should work for nearly any database. Even assuming someone has a MySQL database larger than 2TB, not all tables will require fast storage, while more disk space can be easily added by attaching regular EBS volumes.

I decided …

Can OLTP database workloads use Amazon S3 as primary storage? Now they can, thanks to the Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE), but the question is: how fast?

• ClouSE on “across the street” vs. “across the continent” cloud storage
• ClouSE vs InnoDB
• ClouSE benefits

To answer the question about performance, we decided to run db_STRESS benchmark on a MySQL database in Amazon EC2.  We compared 3 configurations:

• “Across the street storage”: ClouSE with data stored in S3 in the same …

No space left on device – this can happen to anyone. Sooner or later you may face the situation where a database either has already or is only minutes away from running out of disk space. What many people do in such cases, they just start looking for semi-random things to remove – perhaps a backup, a few older log files, or pretty much anything that seems redundant. However this means acting under a lot of stress and without much thinking, so it would be great if there was a possibility to avoid that. Often there is. Or what if there isn’t anything to remove?

While xfs is usually the recommended filesystem for a MySQL data partition on Linux, the extended filesystem family continues to be very popular as it is used as default in all major Linux distributions. There is a feature specific to ext3 and ext4 that can help the goal of resolving the full disk situation.

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