In the 1990s I spent a few years studying requirements on databases used in 3G telecom networks. The main requirement was centered around three keywords, Latency, Throughput and Availability. In this blog post I will focus on Availability.

If a telecom database is down it means that no phone calls can be made, internet connections will not work and your app on your smartphone will cease to work. So more or less impacting each and everyone's life immediately.

The same requirements on databases now also start to appear in AI applications such as online Fraud detection, self-driving cars, smartphone apps.

Availability is measured in percent and for telecom databases the requirement is to reach 99.9999% availability. One often calls this Class 6 availability where 6 is the number of nines in the availability percentage.

Almost every database …

 As introduced in a previous blog RonDB enables us to easily execute benchmarks on RonDB using the Sysbench benchmark.

In this blog I will present some results where the RonDB cluster had 2 data nodes, each using a r5.4xlarge VM in AWS that has 16 VCPUs and 128 GB memory. The Sysbench test uses SQL to access RonDB.

In this particular test case we wanted to test the Key-Lookup performance using SQL. Key-Lookup performance is essential in the RonDB use case as an online Feature Store in Hopsworks.

In this case we use the …

Introduction

In my previous two blogs on this topic I first introduced the concept of automatic thread configuration and the thread model we use in RonDB. After receiving some questions on the topic I dived a bit deeper into explaining the RonDB thread model and its thread pipeline and compared it to another similar concept called batch pipelines.

Since then I read up a bit more on the research in this area with a focus on implementations in other key-value stores. Some researchers argue that a model where one handles the request immediately is superior to a model using a thread pipeline.

RonDB Software …

Introduction

Sysbench is a tool to benchmark to test open source databases. We have integrated Sysbench into the RonDB installation. This makes it extremely easy to run benchmarks with RonDB. This paper will describe the use of these benchmarks in RonDB. These benchmarks were executed with 1 cluster connection per MySQL Server. This limited the scalability per MySQL Server to about 12 VCPUs. Since we executed those benchmarks we have increased the number of cluster connections per MySQL Server to 4 providing scalability to at least 32 VCPUs per MySQL Server.

As preparation to run those benchmarks we have created a RonDB cluster using the Hopsworks framework that is currently used to create …

Release of RonDB 21.04.0

RonDB is based on MySQL NDB Cluster optimised for use in modern cloud settings. Today we launch RonDB 21.04.0. In RonDB 21.04.0 we have integrated benchmark scripts to execute various benchmarks towards RonDB.

There are three ways of using RonDB. The first is using the managed version provided by Logical Clocks. This is currently available in AWS and is currently being developed to also support Azure. This is still in limited access mode. To access it contact Logical Clocks at the rondb.com website.

The second way is to use a script provided by Logical Clocks that automates the creation of VMs and the installation of the software components required by RonDB. These scripts are available to create RonDB clusters on Azure and GCP (Google Cloud). This script can be downloaded from nexus.hops.works/rondb-cloud-installer.sh.

 There are a couple of questions about the blog post on automatic thread configuration in RonDB. Rather than providing an extensive answer in the comment section I thought it was better to answer the questions in a separate blog. In addition I performed a set of microbenchmarks to verify my expectations.

The first question was the following:

ScyllaDB also does something similar with execution stages for better instruction cache. Is this similar to what you're implementing for instruction cache on separating the threads?

The second question is:

I don't really get the functional separation of threads. To execute a query, your data will now go through a pipeline of …

This blog introduces how RonDB handles automatic thread configuration. This blog is more technical and dives deeper under the surface of how RonDB operates. RonDB provides a configuration option, ThreadConfig, whereby the user can have full control over the assignment of threads to CPUs, how the CPU locking is to be performed and how the thread should be scheduled.

However for the absolute majority of users this is too advanced, thus the managed version of RonDB ensures that this thread configuration is based on best practices found over decades of testing. This means that every user of the managed version of RonDB will get access to a thread configuration that is optimised for their particular VM size.

In addition RonDB makes use of adaptive CPU spinning in a way that limits the power usage, but still provides very low latency in all database operations. …