This is the second in a series of three articles about ideas for implementing full support for group commit in MariaDB. The first article discussed the background: group commit in MySQL does not work when the binary log is enabled. See also the third article.

Internally, InnoDB (and hence XtraDB) do support group commit. The way this works is seen in the innobase_commit() function. The work in this function is split into two parts. First, a "fast" part, which registers the commit in memory:

    trx->flush_log_later = TRUE;
    innobase_commit_low(trx);
    trx->flush_log_later = FALSE;

Second, a "slow" part, which writes and fsync's the commit to disk to make it durable:

    trx_commit_complete_for_mysql(trx)

While …

This is the first in a series of three articles about ideas for implementing full support for group commit in MariaDB (for the other parts see the second and third articles). Group commit is an important optimisation for databases that helps mitigate the latency of physically writing data to permanent storage. Group commit can have a dramatic effect on performance, as the following graph shows:

The rising blue and yellow lines show transactions per second when group commit is working, showing greatly improved throughput as the parallelism (number of concurrently running transactions) increases. The flat red and green lines show transactions per second with no group commit, with no scaling at all as parallelism increases. As can be seen, the effect of group commit on …

Oracle managed to score a major victory last week at the MySQL Conference by announcing performance gains of 200-360% in the forthcoming version 5.5.  This is a tremendous improvement and comes in part due to closer collaboration between what were historically two distinct (and occasionally competitive) groups: the InnoBase team and the MySQL Server team.  Bringing the InnoBase team under the direction of the MySQL Server team under Tomas Ullin is a great benefit not only to MySQL developers, but also for MySQL users.  No doubt these performance gains are a result of many months of hard work by not only Tomas, but also a good number of folks on both teams including guys like Mikael Ronstrum, Kojstja, Calvin Sun and others.  

Reaction to the new release has been positive in the community from the likes of …

In the last post choosing about the right type; there is a case about quoting the tuple values; that I forgot to mention which is pretty much a common mistake when string data types are used for storing int or float/double representation (well sometimes you need to use string due to length or to avoid [...]

Today evening one of my friend asked me in the IM to look into one of his production server where a query was taking ~11 seconds to run on 20 million row table, even though the query is using the right index and the plan as shown below:

mysql> explain SELECT channel, COUNT(channel) AS visitors FROM [...]

I have uploaded my three presentations from the 2010 MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, California which was my 5th consecutive year appearing as a speaker.

• IGNITION – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume I
• LIFTOFF – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume 2
• 10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study

A full history of my MySQL presentations can be found on the Presenting page.

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Ever since MySQL 5.5 beta has been announced by Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect; there is lot of positive buzz (here, here, …) about the performance and scalability improvements added in this release. We should all be thankful to Michael Ronstrom (as most of the key developers are already working on different forks), who [...]

We all know how important hardware RAID controllers are in today’s data storage performance especially when dealing with large data sets. If we look at the trend from now to couple of years back; they really evolved rapidly with lot of useful features and their usage also grown as most of the new servers [...]

What a busy week! Lots of MySQL 5.5 announcements that just happened to coincide with the MySQL Conference and Expo in Silicon Valley. Here are some highlights of the performance and scalability work that the InnoDB team was involved with.

A good prep for the week of news is the article Introduction to MySQL 5.5, which includes information about the major performance and scalability features. That article will lead you into the MySQL 5.5 manual for general features and the InnoDB 1.1 manual for performance & scalability info.

Then there were the conference presentations from InnoDB team members, which continued the twin themes of performance and scalability:

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At the UC 2010 I will have a session on MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning. This session will address a lot of the most common performance problems I see in my day to day job with Cluster. A small excerpt of the talk is below here and many other things will be addressed in the session (JOINs, schema optimization, batching, indexes, parameter tuning etc). I hope to see you there!

First a bit on ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz and then blobs!

ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz

One thing is contention on auto_increments, which can really slow down performance.
By default the ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz=1. This means that the mysqld will cache one auto_increment number and then go down to the data …