Two companies are in the process of launching MySQL appliances: Schooner Infotech and Virident. Both incorporate flash in some form and it will be interesting to find out what value they add. I also want to know how they overcome some of the performance limits in InnoDB for multi-core and high-IOPs servers. The problems on multi-core servers are well known. The problems on high-IOPs servers are slowly becoming understood and there are fixes in the v3 Google patch and in Percona binaries.
Do the appliances use official versions of MySQL? The schooner web site states that InnoDB 1.0.3 is used, which goes a long way towards improving performance on servers with 8+ cores.
I will describe some of the IO problems and improvements during my talks at the Percona Performance Conference and the MySQL Conference.
Monday, April 13, 2009
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Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteThanks for you timely post. I am just updating my presentation slides and will address your questions on how Virident MySQL Server scales on multi-cores.
You and Google have done excellent work in this area. I look forward to meeting you at your presentations.
My presentation is at 2pm Tue, Our CTO has a Keynote at 8:30am on Wednesday and we also have a booth. Stop by at any of these and we can chat in details.
-Shirish Jamthe
Great, I will stop by. Percona and Yasufumi Kinoshita, and now InnoDB with InnoDB 1.0.3 plugin have also done a lot.
ReplyDeleteThere's definitely an increase in the number of players in the SSD space. Some others worth noting which we are evaluating are Violin Memory (flash), Texas Memory Systems (RamSan-500 and RamSan-20) and STEC ZeusIOPS SSD drive.
ReplyDelete@Sean - the SSD race is interesting. The value and the profit is in the firmware/filesystem code. With naive code there, write performance suffers. And with it, a few flash devices make for amazing DBMS performance.
ReplyDeleteSo who is doing what to make that better? Is the solution to use update in place file systems and really smart firmware in the SSD device? This is certainly easier to deploy as many of us are committed to extN or XFS. Or are log structured file systems the way to go?
The second issue that more users will confront is the inability for InnoDB to use the newly available write capacity that some of these SSD devices provide. Things in MySQL can use the read capacity. The problems on write heavy workloads are being fixed by Percona and the Google patch.
I will probably end up buying one of the Intel devices for testing at home. They are in my (hobbyist) price range.