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MySQL 5.5 Performance Gains

April 22, 2010
Oracle managed to score a major victory last week at the MySQL Conference by announcing performance gains of 200-360% in the forthcoming version 5.5.  This is a tremendous improvement and comes in part due to closer collaboration between what were historically two distinct (and occasionally competitive) groups: the InnoBase team and the MySQL Server team.  Bringing the InnoBase team under the direction of the MySQL Server team under Tomas Ullin is a great benefit not only to MySQL developers, but also for MySQL users.  No doubt these performance gains are a result of many months of hard work by not only Tomas, but also a good number of folks on both teams including guys like Mikael Ronstrum, Kojstja, Calvin Sun and others.  

Reaction to the new release has been positive in the community from the likes of Jeremy Zawodny, Don MacAaskill and others. Zawodny provides more detail on his blog:

    It seems that in the MySQL 5.5.4 release, several performance bottlenecks that really affected scalability beyond 4 cores have been either eliminated or seriously mitigated. Some of the changes were in MySQL itself, while others are InnoDB specific...

    The benchmarks presented that compared MySQL 5.5.4 with 5.1 show substantial improvements in a variety of workloads. And given how many shops are still running MySQL 5.0.xx in production (including us), that means there really is A LOT to look forward too–especially on newer hardware.

    I, for one, cannot wait to see what this stuff does for us.Thanks to the MySQL and InnoDB teams for their continued hard work and dedication to making MySQL faster as hardware evolves.


For those who have been skeptical, these results should go a long way towards demonstrating Oracle's commitment to ongoing investment and improvement of MySQL.  Who knows, maybe this will help eliminate some of the rhetoric and FUD from the splinter groups in the MySQL community.  And of course, Oracle will need to continue to ramp up investment in other areas of MySQL to make good on their promises.  But they're off to a better start than anyone could have expected.

I've included some video excerpts from keynote presentations by Oracle VP Edward Screven and from Open Source maven Tim O'Reilly below.

Posted at 06:59 AM in Hot Companies, Technology | | Comments (4)

Tags: benchmarks, cloud, innodb, mysql 5.5, open source, performance, tim oreilly

Comments

Zack,

I too am mostly optimistic about MySQLs future under Oracle.

However regarding the performance improvements for 5.5 - As i undertand it, the gains are comparison to 5.1 - In other words, much of it was already there in MySQL 5.4 - in other words, the work of Sun & MySQL, and a number of community contributed patches.

One could argue that MySQL 5.4 would have been released already if not for Oracle's acquisition, in which case the benchmarks would have not been quite so spectacular.

Just saying - Credit where credit is due.

Posted by: Roland Bouman | April 22, 2010 at 01:50 PM

Good point. There were significant gains from many patches that go back to 5.4. But the latest gains from a combined innodb / mysql team go beyond even that.
--zack

Posted by: Zurlocker | April 22, 2010 at 03:57 PM

Was a timeline provided for the release of 5.5?

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