I work on weird and challenging performance issues in the cloud, often deep inside the operating system kernel. These have made for some interesting blog posts in the past, but there’s a lot more I don’t have time to share in that much detail. Here, I’ve summarized ten recent issues that myself and the other engineers at Joyent have worked on. I’d love to see similar summaries from other performance experts worldwide – it’s useful to see the types of issues people are working on and the tools they are using.

This tutorial will demonstrate the MySQL tool explain which is a great tool offered by mysql to analzye queries for further improvement. To run the explain tool you just have to type the command EXPLAIN right before your select query and let MySQL execute it. MySQL will not execute the select query but will analyze it [...]

Tips to increase the performance of your MySQL queries. Use EXPLAIN on your queries EXPLAIN YOUR QUERY will show details of how mysql will execute your query. This is the first thing you should use if you got slow queries. Use the “Slow Query Log” to find the queries you have to optimize. If you don’t [...]

With its distributed, shared-nothing, real-time design, MySQL Cluster has attracted a lot of attention from developers who need to scale both read and write traffic with ultra-low latency and fault-tolerance, using commodity hardware. With many proven deployments in web, gaming, telecoms and mobile use-cases, MySQL Cluster is certainly able to meet these sorts of requirements.

But, as a distributed database, developers do need to think a little differently about data access patterns along with schema and query optimisations in order to get the best possible performance.

Sharing best practices developed by working with MySQL Cluster's largest users, we recently ran a Performance …

I always hear newer and newer exotic way to store different types of data in MySQL. People are trying to solve the problem of storing complex and not necessary strictly structured data in databases which is fine. But I never understood why to try to be tricky with the simplest datatypes. For example Booleans. You would believe it’s easy. Yes or no. But there are several different way to say in MySQL that this is a Boolean.

Possible solutions

1) The most common (consider as a best practice):

TINYINT unsigned NOT NULL

2) The trivial Boolean or Bool column type which is just a synonyms for TINYINT(1):

BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT 0

3) Declaring an enumaration with “true” and “false”:

ENUM('false', 'true') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'false'

4) The newest and weirdest I heard …

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 …

Engineering threads within a Data Node

A new version of the white paper “Guide to Optimizing Performance of the MySQL Cluster Database” has been released; download it here.

This paper steps you through:

• Identifying if your application is a good fit for MySQL Cluster
• Measuring performance and identifying problem performance areas to address
• Optimizing performance:
  • Access patterns
  • Using Adaptive Query Localization for complex Joins
  • Distribution aware applications
  • Batching operations
  …

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

…

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 …

MySQL Cluster partitioning key

I’ll be presenting a webinar covering MySQL Cluster performance on Thursday, July 26. As always, the webinar will be free but you’ll need to register here – you’ll then also receive a link to the charts and a recording of the session after the event.

The replay of this webinar is now available from here.

Here’s the agenda (hoping that I can squeeze it all in!):

• Introduction to MySQL Cluster
• Where does MySQL Cluster fit?
• Benchmarks:
  • ANALYZE TABLE
  …