The best part of the recent MariaDB meeting in Lisbon for me was that I got some good feedback on my group commit work. This has been waiting in the review queue for quite some time now.

One comment I got revolve around an optimisation in the implementation related to how threads are scheduled.

A crucial step in the group commit algorithm is when the transactions being committed have been written into the binary log, and we want to commit them in the storage engine(s) in the same order as they …

(Note that this is a copy of the original article from Hasham Pathan posted on 21st April 2009).

Summary of Results:

We recently conducted a Performance Benchmark of the newly released version of MySQL Cluster database software version 7.0 using the DBT2 Benchmark. The results are very impressive.

Highlight of the results:

• For 4 Node Cluster, we achieved 251,000 Transactions per minute which is more than 4X improvement over the MySQL Cluster 6.3 release.
• For 2 Node Cluster, we achieved 143,000 Transactions per minute which is more than 4X improvement over the MySQL Cluster 6.3 release.
• Whether a user is looking to take advantage of the latest multi-core, multi-thread server processors, or is seeking to reduce space and energy consumption of their Cluster hardware, MySQL Cluster …

This week, Giuseppe Maxia joins us as a special guest and we complete our 2-part series on what we always put in our configuration files, and why.
Part 1 in the series.

strings man page
MySQL manual page about defaults-group-suffix
Giuseppe's article about the hidden options file trick

Logging:
log_error

read …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-02-10 through 2011-03-07:

• Nicholas Piël » Benchmark of Python Web Servers
  Nicholas has done an in-depth benchmarking of several WSGI servers in an effort to document their differences. He takes into account the type of server and which version of HTTP it supports.
• My 10 favourite Programming Quotes | Ginktage
  If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. –  Edsger Dijkstra
• VMware vCloud Director …

Given the popular response from my first lesson in improving scalability where I detailed simple ways to eliminate unnecessary SQL, let me share another common bottleneck with MySQL scalability that can be instantly overcome.

Analyzing the writes that occur on a system can expose obvious potential bottlenecks. The MySQL Binary Log is a wealth of information that can be mined. Simple DML Counts per table can be achieved by a single line command.

Let’s look at the following example output of a production system:

mysqlbinlog /path/to/mysql-bin.000999 |  \
   grep -i -e "^update" -e "^insert" -e "^delete" -e "^replace" -e "^alter"  | \
   cut -c1-100 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |  \
   sed -e "s/\t/ /g;s/\`//g;s/(.*$//;s/ set …

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 …

Using Net::HandlerSocket, here are some fun numbers for a single connection (open & close). When connecting to “localhost”, here’s the strace: open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=187, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b909a1a3000 read(3, "# Do not remove the following [...]

Replication as most people know it, has mostly been SQL statement propagation from master to slave. This is known as "statement-based" replication. But there is also another kind of replication that is available, "the row-based replication" and that has quite a lot of benefits. In this post I intend on highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of both the types of replication to help you choose the best one. I also follow up with my own recommendation.

Some people don't probably know, but there is a difference between how indexes work in MyISAM and how they work in InnoDB, particularly when talking from the point of view of performance enhancement. Now since, InnoDB is starting to be widely used, it is important we understand how indexing works in InnoDB. Hence, the reason for this post!

I've just started learning MySQL's internals but I've got an idea which I want to convert to a question here, to ask people who are already deeper in it. Is it a bad idea to completeley avoid query parsing on the server side and use a binary protocol instead? This way the client parses the query and could cache the statement structure for further usage or another client API uses a NoSQL approach to send the request data to the server.

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