MySQL Cluster running on Raspberry Pi

I start a long weekend tonight and it’s the kids’ last day of school before their school holidays and so last night felt like the right time to play a bit. This week I received my Raspberry Pi – if you haven’t heard of it then you should take a look at the Raspberry Pi FAQ - basically it’s a ridiculously cheap ($25 or $35 if you want the top of the range model) ARM based PC that’s the size of a credit card.

A knew I had to have one to play with but what to do with it? Why not start by porting MySQL Cluster onto it? We always claim that Cluster runs on commodity hardware – surely this would be the ultimate test of that claim.

I chose the customised version of Debian – you have to …

In my previous blog post, I discussed the enhanced performance and scalability delivered by extensions to the multi-threaded data nodes in MySQL Cluster 7.2. In this post, I’ll share best practices on the configuration of data nodes to achieve optimum performance on the latest generations of multi-core, multi-thread CPU designs.

Configuring the Data Nodes

The configuration of data node threads can be managed in two ways via the config.ini file:

- Simply set MaxNoOfExecutionThreads to the appropriate number of threads to be run in the data node, based on the number of threads presented by the processors used in the host or VM.

- Use the new ThreadConfig variable that enables users to configure both the number of each thread type to use and …

Summary

The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark

What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2

MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper

Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use

Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL …

I’m excited to attend the MySQL Innovation Day at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores next Tuesday. There are some great sessions planned on MySQL advances, including:

• InnoDB online operations
• Global transaction IDs for replication and failover
• NoSQL interfaces to InnoDB and NDB
• PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA improvements
• Optimizer enhancements

This is a great opportunity for MySQL users to get details straight from MySQL developers on upcoming features.  While the focus is entirely on what is being done in Engineering to drive MySQL forward, I’ll be around to chat about MySQL Support at the community reception in the afternoon.  If you’re a MySQL Support user, or just interested in learning more about the value MySQL Support can offer, stop by and say …

MySQL Cluster Manager 1.1.6 is now available to download from My Oracle Support.

Details on the changes can will be added to the MySQL Cluster Manager documentation . Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Note that if you’re not a commercial user then you can still download MySQL Cluster Manager 1.1.5 from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and try it out for free. Documentation is available here.

MySQL 5.6 Replication - Global Transaction IDs

On Wednesday (16th May 2012), Mat Keep and I presented on the new replication features that are previewed as part of the latest MySQL 5.6 Development Release.

The replay for that webinar (together with the chart deck) is now available from here.

In addition, there were a huge number of great questions raised and we had a couple of  key engineers answering them on-line – view the Q&A transcript here.

A reminder of the topics covered in the webinar…

MySQL 5.6 delivers new replication capabilities which we will discuss in the …

Following the release of MySQL Cluster 7.2, the Engineering has been busy publishing a range of new performance benchmarks, most recently delivering 1.2 Billion UPDATE operations per Minute across a cluster of 30 x commodity Intel Xeon E5-based servers.

Figure 1: Linear Scaling of Write Operations

These performance tests have been run on the flexAsynch benchmark, so in the this blog, I wanted to provide a little more detail on that benchmark, and provide guidance on how you can use it in your own performance evaluations.

FlexAsynch is an open source, highly adaptable test suite that can be downloaded as part of the MySQL Cluster source tarball under the <storage/ndb/test/ndbapi> directory.

An …

In MySQL cluster each SQL statement is translated inside the NDB storage engine to NDB low level protocol that is sent to the data nodes. For the performance it is most interesting how many data is moved between data nodes and MySQL. To monitor this there are several NDB status variables that you can monitor. See this link for more documentation.

(There are also the NDBINFO tables that reflect cluster status. But these are only global values. The status variables also show session status. More about NDBINFO is here.)

To easily report the NDB status on an individual SQL statement, I wrote a little script that gives you the ndb status variables and automatically calculates the diffs before and after the statement in …

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.1,21 has now been made available at https://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/7.1.html#downloads (GPL version) or https://support.oracle.com/ (commercial version).

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.1.22 (compared to 7.1.21) are available from the 7.1.22 Change log.

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.2.6 has now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/ (GPL version) or https://support.oracle.com/ (commercial version).

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.2.6 (compared to 7.2.5) are available from the 7.2.6 Change log.