So, I’ve written previously on MySQL on POWER, and today is a quick bit of news about MySQL Cluster on POWER – specifically MySQL Cluster 7.3.7.

I ran into three main issues in getting some flexAsync benchmark results. One of them was the fact that I wanted to do this in the middle of all the POWER8 machines I usually use moving buildings (hard to run benchmarks when computers are packed up in boxes on a truck).

The next issue was that ndbmtd (the multi-threaded data node) needs memory barriers for the magic message passing stuff between threads. So, that’s pretty easy (about an eight line patch).

The next issue was in the results from flexAsync, it turns out 32bit math is a bad idea with results from my POWER8 box.

My preliminary performance numbers are fairly promising (actually… what is the world record for a single machine and NDB these days? Single data node?). I think there’s a bit more low …

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Okay, now that is out of the way….

If you’re the kind of person who follows the MySQL bugs database closely or subscribes to the MySQL Internals mailing list, you may have worked out that I’ve spent a small amount of time poking at MySQL on modern POWER systems.

Unlike Intel CPUs, POWER CPUs require explicit memory barriers to synchronize memory state between different CPUs. This means that when you’re implementing synchronization primitives, you have one extra thing to get …