MySQL, High Availability and other goodies…

I'm not sure I care what the version number is (5.3,5.4,5.4,6.0), and you can talk about milestone releases all you want. What really matters to me is when we'll have something beyond 5.1 marked as GA. Will it be 5.5? When should I expect that?

5.4 was announced last year at the conference with lots of performance fixes for the mysql server itself. Great. Until those changes percolate up into a stable release, they aren't worth too much to me. With all the hoopla about the release cycle, I haven't seen any results in the form of new features/fixes making it to stable any faster than 5.1 did.

Doing some performance testing on some modern hardware comparing Innodb plugin 1.0.4 with stock Innodb. I'm running a sysbench transactions test (reads and writes) with 200M rows in my table (table size is around 46G, RAM is 16G, buffer pool is set to 12G).

I was puzzled to see the innodb plugin to be decent, but not really as great as I expected, I was doing about ~6100 RW operations a second (individual statements within transactions). Then I compared it to the stock innodb and shockingly I got ~7K ops. I thought about what I tuned that was different in the plugin and came up with the innodb_io_capacity.

In response to Eric Day's post on "Eventually Consistent Relational Database?"... I started posting a comment there, but I realized I have my own blog for this sort of thing. :)

I've been thinking the same thing, it's nice to hear I'm not the only one. This is a neglected area of "cloud" development, mostly because it's a big scary problem. Everyone says "use NoSQL", but if we had strategies/systems to give us EC RDBMS solutions, nobody would use key/value storage (except where it actually made sense). NoSQL is a big golden hammer nowadays. It works, but it sure takes a lot of effort to code stuff the storage layer should be able to handle (joins, etc.).

Thanks a ton to Xarb who reminded me of pipes in his blog post about filtering out fluffy planet mysql authors.