Why should you care about the latest “early adopter” release of the InnoDB Plugin, version 1.0.3?   One word: performance! The release introduces these features:

• Enhanced concurrency & scalability: the “Google SMP patch” using atomic instructions for mutexing
• More efficient memory allocation: ability to use more scalable platform memory allocator
• Improved out-of-the-box scalability: unlimited concurrent thread execution by default
• Dynamic tuning: at run-time, enable or disable insert buffering and adaptive hash indexing

These new performance features can yield up to twice the throughput or more, depending on your workload, platform and other tuning considerations. In another post, we explore some details about these changes, but first, what do these enhancements mean for performance and scalability?

In brief, we’ve …

Well, here we are … the first post to the InnoDB blog.   Now there is a blog dedicated solely to InnoDB products and technology. The Innobase team will be posting here regularly on all manner of topics regarding the InnoDB storage engine.  We plan to provide timely updates and important technical information about InnoDB-related products including the built-in InnoDB distributed by MySQL, the InnoDB Plugin and InnoDB Hot Backup.  We invite you to visit regularly and post your comments.

We’ve borrowed the name “Transactions on” from the computer-science journal Transactions on Database Systems, published by the ACM society for computing professionals.  Like that journal, this blog will cover a wide range of database topics, specifically as they relate to InnoDB.

Users of InnoDB know a transaction is an atomic all-or-nothing set of changes made to a collection of data.  But …