Oracle doubles the speed of MySQL query handling

From PC World: For the next release of its open source MySQL, Oracle is making a number of changes designed to vastly boost the speed of the open source relational database management system.

Such a sizeable performance bump could help organizations save money in server purchases, because it would require fewer servers to run large jobs. Or, it will allow them to run complex queries that might have taken too long to run on earlier versions of the database system, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle vice president of MySQL engineering.

On Monday, the company released the latest development version of the software, MySQL Development Milestone 5.7.4, along with a number of associated programs for managing the database. The last major version of MySQL, version 5.6, was released in February 2013.

Oracle typically issues milestone releases of upcoming versions of MySQL on a quarterly basis, offering them to users for testing purposes.

This new version of MySQL has demonstrated the ability to respond to 512,000 read-only queries per second (qps), more than twice 250,000 read-only QPS that MySQL 5.6 was capable of performing.

Performance has also been improved for users of the Memcached caching plug-in, which goes around MySQL’s default InnoDB database engine to access the database rows directly, for speedier performance. This approach can now offer a read-only throughput of over a million QPS.

There was not one single revision that Oracle made that improved the performance; rather it is the cumulative effect of many individual changes, Ulin said.

The performance improvements are especially timely given the changing nature of the servers that MySQL runs on, according to Ulin.

Historically, MySQL was designed to run on commercial servers with single processor cores. Customers today are buying servers with 16, 32 or even 64 processor cores. So much of the performance work around MySQL has been around better handling multiple threads operating over the same data structure.

“We have to evolve to where the mainstream is,” Ulin said. “People won’t be happy if they upgraded from a 16-core to 32-core machine and they get no benefit.”

Performance improvements were made around other parts of the DBMS as well. For instance, the software also reduces the amount of time it takes to establish a connection with the database, thanks to some work Facebook contributed.

Last week, Facebook, along with Google and a number of other large Internet services companies, announced they were working together to coordinate development of code that would better equip MySQL for large Web-scaled operations, in a project called WebScaleSQL.

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