Just a quick note to let everyone know that our new benchmarking script now supports OSX 10.6 on Intel hardware. That means you can run one simple command and get all of the sequential and random INSERT and SELECT performance statistics about your database performance. As usual the script is open source and released under the new BSD license. Give is a try by downloading now! See the download page for more details.

You can download the first release of the benchmarking script here: http://code.google.com/p/dbbenchmark/

Please read the README file or consult the Support page before running the benchmarks.

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard …

I am publishing my MySQL related bookmark collection http://www.mysqlpreacher.com/bookmarks/.

Feel free to send me links you think might be good to add in order to help others.

Remember, SHARING IS CARING!!! …. we get so much for free, why shouldn’t we give some back?

Cheers,
Darren

I have several side projects when time permits and one is that of benchmarking various MySQL technologies (e.g. MySQL 5.0,5.1,5.4), variants (e.g. MariaDB, Drizzle) and storage engines (e.g. Tokutek, Innodb plugin) and even other products like Tokyo Cabinet which is gaining large implementations.

You have two options with benchmarks, the brute force approach such as Sysbench, TPC, sysbench, Juice Benchmark, iibench, mysqlslap, skyload. I prefer the realistic approach however these are always on client’s private data. What is first needed is better access to public data for benchmarks. I have compiled this list to date and I am seeking additional sources for reference.

• Feebase – Data is in clean loadable format
• IMDB – Not clean, but Roland Bouman is working on …

One of the ways to import data into MySQL is using the LOAD DATA INFILE. It is a faster method than recovering from a dump, as it’s raw data instead of SQL sentences.

The import time depends on the table engine, for example, MyISAM can be 40 times faster than Innodb. Let’s benchmark this:

Preparation

I’m gonna make some benchmarking using MySQL 5.1.36 (64 bits MacOS X). I’ll need a big table, so I’ll take City from the World Database and create a huge table called “city_huge”:

CREATE TABLE city_huge LIKE CITY;

INSERT INTO city_huge 
    SELECT NULL, name, CountryCode, District, Population FROM city;
# Run this sentence 100 times,
# so city_huge table will be 100 times bigger than city.
# Tip: use a script, temporary table, stored procedure...
# or tell your monkey to do so.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM …

For any production MySQL Database system, running RAID is a given these days. Do you know what RAID your database is? Are you sure?. Ask for quantifiable reproducible output from your systems provider or your System Administrator.

As a consultant I don’t always know the specific tools for the clients deployed H/W, but I ask the question. On more the one occasion the actual result differed from the clients’ perspective or what they were told, and twice I’ve discovered that clients when asked if their RAID was running in a degraded mode, it actually was and they didn’t know.

You can read about various benchmarks at MySQL blogs such as BigDBAHead and MySQL Performance Blog however getting first hand experience of your actually RAID …

Last week I posted the following twitter request — “Can somebody loan me (or buy me) a Dell 2950 decked out so I can run and publish some benchmarks. Please!”

In a same day response I was offered access to use 2 x Dell 1950’s, and today I’m now actually using these machines for my own testing. I would like to thank cafemom (Barry, Anthony & Dan) for the loan of hardware.

And now the chance to better understand the RAID configuration of the DELL PERC Controllers, trying out some different RAID types, LVM configurations and disk tests. When I’m done with my System Administrator refresher, I’m then be trying some different MySQL Benchmarks to test various MySQL configuration settings including using the new Juice …

My previous post contained a lua script for MySQL proxy that would generate benchmarking information. However, just days (or maybe hours?) after I published it, release 0.7 of mysql-proxy was published, making my script obsolete. I’ve fixed this (it needed just a minor tweak), so here‘s a tarball with the following: trace.lua, which is the […]

Related posts:

1. Using MySQL Proxy to benchmark query performance By transparently sitting between client and server on each request,...
2. New release of MySQL Proxy GPL MySQL Proxy has a new release, just three days ago,...
3. …

By transparently sitting between client and server on each request, MySQL Proxy offers many possibilities for query manipulation.

Many are explored in the cookbook, and they even include a histogram recipe. Still, I wanted to learn more about the proxy while working on a script that would let me get some stats on the queries executed against a server (or group of servers).

First things first, get a brief glimpse of the lua programming language since that’s what the proxy’s scripts are written in. Alternatively, you can jump straight into the sample scripts, extrapolate what you don’t understand of the syntax by making paralelizations against other …