Category Archives: Performance
“The only workload that matters is my production workload” (for all values of “my”). So you can manage this responsibility, SCARY is a software tool which aims to take the uncertainty out of change; software, configuration and hardware changes. This is very early in development, but projects have to start somewhere.
SCARY takes a read view of the production database query execution, and does the equivalent query on a copy of the production database, that has differences. The query speed, query plan, data result (eventually) will be recorded along with what went on in production.
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Let’s say you are a Cloud Service Provider, with many customers – each having many MariaDB Server users and databases. What if several such customers could share a single instance of MariaDB Server? That’s what we call the catalog feature, a feature that – if implemented – could potentially save lots of resources (and thus costs!) in a number of high-end use cases.
How the idea was born
At CloudFest 2023 near Frankfurt in March, we had in-depth meetings with a number of heavy MariaDB Server users – ones that one best would describe as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).
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Continue reading “Multi-tenancy through catalogs in MariaDB Server”
With MariaDB 10.0.0 having been released over ten years ago (12 Nov 2012), you may ask yourself when there will be MariaDB 11.0.0. If so, I can answer you: Today.
You can now download MariaDB Server 11.0 Alpha preview from our dedicated download page and check out the release notes.
Time has passed …
Of course, we have a better reason for going with a new first number in a release other than ten years having passed. Significant new features. Significant incompatibilities with earlier versions.
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Continue reading “MariaDB 11.0 – new optimizer, new major version series”
Yes, it is a bit of a click-bait title, but in this case running one SQL command did improve a community user’s performance by that much. It could help you too.
The story
A community user posted in a couple of places that when migrating a large WordPress installation to MariaDB that they were seeing a certain query performing terribly. The query was taking 1.5 seconds to execute and it was clear from the explain plan that the optimizer was not making an ideal decision about the join order.
The query was generated by WordPress so it would not be easy to force an index, or rewrite the query.
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Continue reading “This one trick can make MariaDB 30x faster!”
2020 has seen quite a few developments with the ARM architecture. For MariaDB things are no different. First we have expanded our testing infrastructure to cover more Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RedHat) on ARM and we are now building packages for all of them. The next MariaDB release will include additional binary tarballs for ARM distributions, in addition to the already existing RPM and DEB packages.
All this could not be accomplished without the help of Huawei, who have donated several ARM builders to our effort. We strongly believe that only by testing on as many different platforms as possible, with as many different compilers as possible we can guarantee MariaDB’s performance and stability.
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We recently had a chance to test how the Shannon Direct-IO PCIe Flash G3i devices improves the performance of MariaDB. Anybody who cares about I/O performance has noticed that PCIe drives have become readily available in recent years and that they are significantly faster than normal SSD drives connected to the traditional SATA port (not to mention hard disk drives). In addition to being great hardware, the Shannon drives offer an extra boost by having a device driver that supports atomic writes. This means the device guarantees that a write made to it reaches the drive, and thus the MariaDB server does not have to run extra checks like it does on normal hardware.
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Continue reading “Improved MariaDB performance using Shannon Systems PCIe and atomic writes”
Recently we had a report from a user who had seen a stunning 90% performance regression after upgrading his server to a Linux kernel with KPTI (kernel page-table isolation – a remedy for the Meltdown vulnerability). (more…) …
Continue reading “MyISAM and KPTI – Performance Implications From The Meltdown Fix”
When you have read my previous blog post about MariaDB 10.1 GA performance, you have probably wondered why I didn’t include any numbers for MySQL 5.7. There are two reasons: first MySQL wasn’t GA at that time and secondly MySQL is not running stable on Power8.
Today I will come up with a comparison benchmark. I have chosen some more down-to-earth hardware for that because that is what the majority of our users will be running. Specifically it’s a SP-64 cloud machine from OVH. It has a 4-core Intel CPU and 64G of RAM. Disks aren’t fancy, but the benchmark is again a simplified read-only OLTP workload that runs from memory. …
Continue reading “MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware”