It can be very easy to improve scalability with a MySQL server by a few simple rules. Here is one of them.

“The most efficient way to improve an SQL statement is to eliminate it”

There are numerous ways to eliminate SQL statements, however before I give a classic example that I’ve observed again with a client, let me explain the basic premise of why this improves scalability?

The MySQL kernel can only physically process a certain number of SQL statements for a given time period (e.g. per second). Regardless of the type of machine you have, there is a physical limit. If you eliminate SQL statements that are unwarranted and unnecessary, you automatically enable more important SQL statements to run. There are numerous other downstream affects, however this is the simple math. To run more SQL, reduce the number of SQL you need to run.

Here is the output of a small sample of analyzed TCP/IP …

I’m not sure how many of this blog’s readers are likely to be aware of VoltDB. It is one of the systems that I think could be poised to dispel the notion that SQL (or the relational model) is somehow inherently unscalable. Here’s a blog post explaining how VoltDB does transaction ordering and replication.

Related posts:

1. Why MySQL replication is better than mysqlbinlog for recovery
2. What are your favorite MySQL replication filtering rules?
3. …

Mat Keep’s blog post on InnoDB-vs-MyISAM benchmarks that Oracle recently published prompted me to do some mathematical modeling of InnoDB’s scalability as the number of cores in the server increases. Vadim runs lots of benchmarks that measure what happens under increasing concurrency while holding the hardware constant, but not as many with varying numbers of cores, so I decided to use Mat Keep’s data for this. The modeling I performed is Universal Scalability Law modeling, which can predict both software and hardware scalability, depending on how it is used.

In brief, the benchmarks are sysbench’s read-only and read-write tests, and the server has two Intel SSDs, 64GB of memory, and 4 x 12-core …

Recently am part of Zynga‘s database team as I was pretty much impressed with company’s database usage. As everyone knows how popular Zynga games like Farmville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars,[...]

Googling around, I came across Bradford Cross' article, Big Data Is Less About Size, And More About Freedom. Bradford writes, " The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it."

Even though the article makes some good points, I'm not sure I can agree with Bradford's point of view here. As an architect, when I think in terms of Big Data, the ability to do "cool stuff" is probably the last thing that crosses my mind. Big Data, to me, is about ensuring constant response time as the data grows in size without sacrificing functionality.

What do you think Big Data is about? Is it merely about being able to do 'cool stuff' with your data? Is it about ensuring constant access/response times? Or is it about something else? I'm eager …

I wrote this as a reply to Does Lean Startup Methodology Apply to Consumer Startups?" However, due to comment length restrictions on that blog, I am posting my comment here and welcome your thoughts.

"An enterprise will pilot products and iterate with a vendor: Let's run a 6 month consulting engagement/pilot to evaluate if this new database solves the problem."

Only an enterprise where there is a major disconnect between management and engineering will opt for this path. In enterprises where needed data I/O patterns are understood, taking such path may spell disaster.

The primary problem with the 'lean startup' methodology that I see is that it blindly preaches entrepreneurs to close their eyes, cut corners and just get the product …

Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers.

One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the necessary metrics from network traffic. I had this idea after studying the data in Linux’s /proc/diskstats file. It turns out that two simple metrics can provide amazingly rich insight into system performance and scalability, in combination with Little’s Law and queueing theory. These are the busy time and the total time that requests were resident in the system. There are different terms for the latter, but in MySQL we’d call it query response time. After studying these for a few months, I’m so …

2010 has been the first year I have re-presented any of my developed MySQL presentations. Historically I have always created new presentations, however Paul Vallee gave me some valuable advice at UC 2010. In the past two weeks I’ve traveled to seven countries in South America on the OTN LA tour where I have been speaking about and promoting MySQL.

My three current presentations have been improved and even simplified, more future improvements are planned. There is definitely a benefit in repeating a good presentation multiple times.

My SQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite OTN View more …

This week I was one of the presenters at the first Surge Scalability Conference in Baltimore. An event that focused not just on one technology but on what essential tools, technologies and practices system architects need to know about for successfully scaling web applications.

While MySQL is an important product in many environments, it is only one component for a successful technology stack and for many organizations is one of several products that manage your data.

My presentation was on the common MySQL scalability mistakes and how to avoid them. This is a problem/solution approach and is a companion talk with Successful MySQL Scalability which describes design for successfully scalability …

Last night I was the invited guest at the SF MySQL Meetup. In my presentation “Successful MySQL Scalability” I talked about a set of principles to ensure appropriate system architecture, data availability and best practices to build an ideal solution for your business. The presentation was also live streamed and is available online.

Successful MySQL Scalability