Previously I tested Tokutek’s Fractal Trees (TokuMX & TokuMXse) as MongoDB storage engines – today let’s look into the MySQL area.

I am going to use modified LinkBench in a heavy IO-load.

I compared InnoDB without compression, InnoDB with 8k compression, TokuDB with quicklz compression.
Uncompressed datasize is 115GiB, and cachesize is 12GiB for InnoDB and 8GiB + 4GiB OS cache for TokuDB.

Important to note is that I used tokudb_fanout=128, which is only available in our latest Percona Server release.
I …

It is my pleasure to announce that Percona has acquired Tokutek and will take over development and support for TokuDB® and TokuMX™ as well as the revolutionary Fractal Tree® indexing technology that enables those products to deliver improved performance, reliability and compression for modern Big Data applications.

At Percona we have been working with the Tokutek team since 2009, helping to improve performance and scalability. The TokuDB storage engine has been available for Percona Server for about a year, so joining forces is quite a natural step for us.

Fractal Tree indexing technology—developed by years of data science research at MIT, Stony Brook University and Rutgers University—is the new generation data structure which, for many workloads, leapfrogs traditional B-tree technology which was invented in 1972 (over 40 years ago!).  It is also often …

In Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems, we explored the paradox that “Big Data” projects pose to organizations and how Tokutek is taking an innovative approach to solving those problems. In this post, we’re going to talk about another hot topic in IT, “The Cloud,” and how enterprises undertaking Cloud efforts often struggle with idea of “problem trading.” Also, for some reason, databases are just given a pass as traditionally “noisy neighbors” and that there is nothing that can be done about it. Lets take a look at why we disagree.

With the birth of the information age came a coupling of business and IT. Increasingly strategic business projects and objectives were reliant on information infrastructure to provide information storage and retrieval instead of paper and filing cabinets. This was the dawn of the database and what gave rise to companies like Oracle, Sybase and MySQL. With the appearance of true Enterprise Grade …

Section I: Fractal Tree and Optimization Overview
Tokutek’s Fractal Tree® technology provides fast performance by injecting small messages into buffers inside the Fractal Tree index. This allows writes to be batched, thus eliminating I/O that is required in traditional B-tree indexes for every operation. Additional background information on how Fractal Trees operate can be found in Zardosht Kasheff’s blog entitled, TokuMX Fractal Tree Indexes, What Are They? Don’t be thrown off by the title, Fractal Tree Indexes access data in the same way for TokuDB as they do for TokuMX.

For tables whose workload pattern is a high number of sequential deletes, some operational maintenance is required to ensure consistently fast performance.  If this is not done, delete messages and garbage can exist in the Fractal …

Welcome to blog #2 in a series about the benefits of the Fractal Tree. In this post, I’ll be explaining Big Data, why it poses such a problem and how Tokutek can help. Given the fact that I am a lifelong fan of both Hip-hop and Big Data, the title was a no-brainer and, given the artist, a bit of a pun.

 I am as tired as you of hearing the term “Big Data.” It’s so overused, that it ceases to have specific meaning anymore. You see, data hardly ever starts as “big” or a “problem.” Rather, it starts small and easily manageable, but gradually grows to some unimaginable size and becomes a beast in need of slaying, like the irradiated ant from a sci-fi film, growing to the size of a cruise ship. The nature of tackling such a tough problem means that the initial understanding of the factors involved is, oftentimes, incomplete at best; Catch-22 exemplified. During the course of problem it is …

In my recent travels, I’ve been speaking with database users at various meetups and trade shows worldwide. Very often, I got questions centering around the best use cases for our products, be it TokuDB, our MySQL storage engine, or, TokuMX, our distribution of MongoDB. Over 90% of the time, I responded Cloud, Big Data or both. You see, in the software industry we’re like kindergartners, we like things to fit into neat categories. If you know any software sales people, you’ll recognize this as a fitting analogy (at least in terms of energy and attention span), but I digress. This strategy helps allocate resources where they are most likely to make an impact, and, thus, optimize our return on investment. In this blog series, I’m going to go slightly against the grain and explain why the Fractal Tree makes databases work in these environments.

Before I get into more detail, let me …

If you want to use TokuDB with MariaDB, MySQL, or Percona Server, you will need to disable support for transparent hugepages in Linux.

Fortunately, this is very easy to check, and to change.

An easy way to check is with:

cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

This will return something like:

[always] madvise never

Note the word surrounded by “[]” is what this option is set to. So the above is set to “always”. To disable it, we want it set to “never”.

I’ve found the easiest way to change/set this is to add the below to your /etc/rc.local file (and then reboot your system):

if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled; then
   echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
fi
if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag; then
   echo …

TokuDB is gaining more and more popularity and many people are finding it very helpful for certain cases.

Using/enabling it in some distributions can be quite a pain, but enabling it in MariaDB is easy as 1-2-…, well, only 1-2, since that’s all there is to it!

1. Ensure you have the correct MariaDB version:

• MariaDB 5.5.36+
• MariaDB 10.0.9+
• Note: Linux 64-bit systems only – specific packages include: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat
• Note: If using the Linux tarball – it must be the version built with glibc 2.14+

2. Run this command:

INSTALL SONAME 'ha_tokudb';

or update my.cnf file with:

[mysqld]
plugin-load=ha_tokudb

There is one requirement from TokuDB, which is to have transparent …

Attending Percona Live in London next week?

Don’t miss the chance to hear Tokutek’s Vice President of Engineering, Tim Callaghan, discuss how to use your MySQL knowledge to become an instant MongoDB Guru and the advantages of using Fractal Tree® indexes in MySQL and MongoDB. Tim will be speaking about these topics in two separate sessions at 12:00pm and 5:00pm on November 12.

For more information on these sessions and Percona Live-London, visit https://www.percona.com/live/london-2013/users/tim-callaghan.

One of our customers reported that ‘create table select from’ statements stall for a period of time equal to the TokuDB lock timeout.  This indicated a lock conflict between multiple transactions.  In addition, other MySQL clients that were opening unrelated tables were also stalled.  This indicated that some shared mutex is held too long.  We discuss details about this bug and how it was fixed.  The bug fix will be distributed in TokuDB 7.1.0.

Example
Suppose that we set the tokudb lock timeout to 60 seconds just to exaggerate the stall.

mysql> set global tokudb_lock_timeout=60000;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)


We then create a simple table.

mysql> create table s (id int primary key);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)


When we create new table (t) and populate it from some …