The Value of MySQL Storage Engines

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:11:00 -0400

Or, The World May Be Coming to an End

Something very disturbing happened yesterday. I started liking the idea of MySQL storage engines.

It happened after reading the second comment of this post. In retrospect this article had a lot of influence on my thinking as well, but it was the idea of pluggable storage engines as a way to advance new and better storage mechanisms - not just new and different database systems - that really changed my thinking.

So, in the coming weeks, I'll be doing what I can to learn more about the MySQL storage engines I've heard mentioned recently (namely ScaleDB, Tokutek, KickFire, InfoBright and a few others) and posting what I learn here. If there are others you think I should pay attention to please let me know.

RAM Storage is not the Answer... At Least not for MySQL

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:10:00 -0400

There's an interesting article over at MySQL Performance Blog that talks about some MySQL benchmarks using RAM-based storage.

Here's the most interesting part (to me, anyway):

However even with MyISAM we got CPU bound before we could reach the system capacity - these 70K queries/sec generated just over 50K IOs/sec while capacity was over 100K IOs/sec

I think Peter hits the nail on the head when he theorizes about the cause of the performance problems he saw:

My guess is Innodb just was not really designed and tested in such condition - normal case is to allocate cache memory to buffer pool so IOs will mostly come from drives directly

We all know that I'm not a big fan of MySQL, so I'm prone to believe that other systems might handle this better. But the point still holds - RAM storage is not the answer. Having super-fast I/O won't solve your performance problems unless the DBMS you're using is designed to take advantage of it. And given that every DBMS I can think of is designed around the assumption that I/O is expensive and contortions to avoid it are cheap, odds are that the database you're using isn't designed to take advantage of it. So don't bet that super-fast storage - RAM-based or otherwise - will solve your performance problems.

In short: think smaller, not faster.

Full Table Scan - MySQL

The Value of MySQL Storage Engines

RAM Storage is not the Answer... At Least not for MySQL