An NVM Aware MariaDB Database System and Associated IO Workload on File Systems

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system and originally designed and implemented in order to use the traditional spinning disk architecture. With Non-Volatile memory (NVM) technology now in the forefront and main stream for server storage (Data centers), MariaDB addresses the need by adding support for NVM devices and introduces NVM Compression method. NVM Compression is a novel hybrid technique that combines application level compression with flash awareness for optimal performance and storage efficiency. Utilizing new interface primitives exported by Flash Translation Layers (FTLs), we leverage the garbage collection available in flash devices to optimize the capacity management required by compression systems. We implement NVM Compression in the popular MariaDB database and use variants of commonly available POSIX file system interfaces to provide the extended FTL capabilities to the user space application. The experimental results show that the hybrid approach of NVM Compression can improve compression performance by 2-7x, deliver compression performance for flash devices that is within 5% of uncompressed performance, improve storage efficiency by 19% over legacy Row-Compression, reduce data writes by up to 4x when combined with other flash aware techniques such as Atomic Writes, and deliver further advantages in power efficiency and CPU utilization. Various micro benchmark measurement and findings on sparse files call for required improvement in file systems for handling of punch hole operations on files

Factors That Influence Throughput on Cloud-Hosted MySQL Server

Many businesses are moving their infrastructure to the cloud and may not fully understand the factors that can increase costs. With so many factors available to improve throughput in a database, it can be difficult for a database administrator to know which factors can provide the best efficiency to maintain lower costs. Grounded in Six Sigma theoretical framework, the purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to evaluate the relationship between the time of day, the number of concurrent users, InnoDB buffer pool size, InnoDB Input/Output capacity, and MySQL transaction throughput to a MySQL database running on a cloud, virtual, database server. Data were collected from Debian Linux virtual machines (VMs) on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure using HammerDB database benchmarking software. The results of the one-way ANOVA were not significant. A key recommendation is to study further other factors and a more in-depth investigation into each cloud provider\u27s performance. The implications for positive social change include the potential for database administrators to make informed decisions on how to configure MySQL to run in a VM and choose the best cloud provider so that nonprofits may serve their clients more efficiently