Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

This Thursday (November 13, 2008), Martin "MC" Brown will give an overview of MySQL on openSolaris. MC is an expert on MySQL and Solaris, and has helped the openSolaris team to port MySQL to that platform. The session will start at 14:00 UTC/BST (15:00 CET).

For those of you who've never heard the term before, MySQL University is an educational program for engineers from Sun/MySQL and the MySQL community. It's free and open to anyone. MySQL University focuses on MySQL internals and on Sun technology that can be used in connection with MySQL.

Here's the updated schedule for the rest of this year. Note that 14:00 BST currently translates to 14:00 UTC – sorry for getting this wrong with the last announcement. As always, check out the …

On Thursday, November 13, 2008 (14:00 UTC / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET), I’ll be presenting a MySQL University session on MySQL and OpenSolaris.

The presentation will be similar to the presentation I did at the London OpenSolaris Users Group in July, you can see that presentation by visiting the LOSUG: July 2008 page.

The presentation on thursday will be slightly different - I’ll be providing a bit more hands-on information about how to install MySQL, how to configure and change the configuration and some more detail on solutions like the Webstack and Coolstack distributions.

I’ll also cover our plans for the inclusion of MySQL 5.1 in OpenSolaris, which will happen next year, and provide some examples on the new DTrace probes that we have been adding to MySQL generally.

Of course, if there’s anything specific you want me to …

At the European Customer Conference a couple of weeks back, one of the topics was the use of DRBD. DRBD is a kernel-based block device that replicates the data blocks of a device from one machine to another. The documentation I developed for that and MySQL is available here.

Fundamentally, with DRBD, you set up a physical device, configure DRBD on top of that, and write to the DRBD device. In the background, on the primary, the DRBD device writes the data to the physical disk and replicates those changed blocks to the seconday, which in turn writes the data to it’s physical device. The result is a block level copy of the source data. In an HA solution, which means that you can switch over from your primary host to your secondary host in the event of system failure and be sure pretty certain that the data on the primary and seconday are the same.

…

You are just getting started with MySQL on OpenSolaris. You've installed the OpenSolaris Community Edition and CoolStack MySQL. To explore this new environment you decide to run some tests using the sysbench benchmark. After running a number of tests you realize that for some reason the options you are setting in /etc/my.cnf are not getting used.

What is going on? Not to worry, you've just hit a problem common to new users of MySQL on OpenSolaris.

Run this command:

 # /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin/mysqladmin | more

page down until you see:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /opt/coolstack/mysql/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

This shows …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …

You are just getting started with MySQL on OpenSolaris. You've installed the OpenSolaris Community Edition and CoolStack MySQL. To explore this new environment you decide to run some tests using the sysbench benchmark. After running a number of tests you realize that for some reason the options you are setting in /etc/my.cnf are not getting used.

What is going on? Not to worry, you've just hit a problem common to new users of MySQL on OpenSolaris.

Run this command:

 # /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin/mysqladmin | more

page down until you see:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /opt/coolstack/mysql/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

This shows …

You are just getting started with MySQL on OpenSolaris. You've installed the OpenSolaris Community Edition and CoolStack MySQL. To explore this new environment you decide to run some tests using the sysbench benchmark. After running a number of tests you realize that for some reason the options you are setting in /etc/my.cnf are not getting used.

What is going on? Not to worry, you've just hit a problem common to new users of MySQL on OpenSolaris.

Run this command:

 # /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin/mysqladmin | more

page down until you see:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /opt/coolstack/mysql/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

This shows …