As noted in the announcement, this release contains contributions from Sun Microsystems, Google and Percona, Inc., for which we are very appreciative. This page briefly describes each of the contributions and the way we treated them. The purpose of this post is to describe the general approach the InnoDB team takes toward third party contributions.

In principle, we appreciate third party contributions. However, we simply don’t have the resources to seriously evaluate every change that someone proposes, but when we do undertake to evaluate a patch, we have some clear criteria in mind:

• The patch has to be technically sound, reliable, and effective
• The change should fit with the architecture, and our overall plans and philosophy for InnoDB
• The contribution must be available to us under a suitable license

Let’s consider, in general terms, what these criteria mean in practice.

We have to expend a fair bit of effort to carefully evaluate and possibly modify a patch before we can include it in the release. Some of the third party contributions we’ve seen have not been portable, or have been developed just for Linux. It can take time to find an approach that enables a platform to take advantage of a new feature, even if the platform has the required capabililties. Some of the patches we’ve evaluated have contained actual bugs that would impact reliability, cause deadlocks or have other negative implications. InnoDB is a clean and elegant piece of code, yet some of its internal algorithms and behaviors are subtle and complex. Therefore, changes in the “guts” of InnoDB (or any storage engine) must be done carefully and thoroughly tested. Some patches that have been offered make a difference, but only when compared to an inappropriate “baseline”. At any given point, we would look to include a patch only if it makes a significant improvement over the “best” version or configuration of InnoDB available at the time. We like to test each patch in isolation, to assess its individual value. This requires some rigorous performance testing, with multiple workloads.

From time to time, third parties have made suggestions for changes that may seem attractive at first, but don’t make sense longer term. In general, we may have a more comprehensive approach to a problem or requirement that we would like to implement, rather than incorporate a patch that would introduce a feature that would ultimately be made obsolete. We prefer to have fewer “knobs” and tuning complexity, so we’re more inclined to implement heuristic, self-tuning capabilities than we are to add new configuration parameters. Lastly, we take care to protect the ability to upgrade and downgrade user databases with the file format management features in the InnoDB Plugin. If a patch requires an on-disk change, we will defer its incorporation until the time comes to implement a new file format.

For us to be able to make continued investment in InnoDB, we must be able to license the software commercially. OEMs and ISVs who incorporate MySQL with InnoDB in their products may not wish to release their products in open source form. Therefore, for each contribution we are to accept, we must have clear legal rights to the change.

Beyond all that, of course, we take care to carefully document each new feature, both in terms of form and function. We try hard to explain the implications of a feature, providing information about what it does, and when and where to use a feature, as well as how to do so. And, we generally speaking are committed to upward compatibility and support of a feature once it is introduced.

It’s pretty clear that the integrity of InnoDB, with its broad adoption and importance everywhere it is used, is paramount to you and to us. You can trust the InnoDB team to protect InnoDB now and in the future, while being open to suggestions and contributions. Let us know if you think we’re doing a good job!

Well, it took us a little while (we’ve been busy !), but we’ve now posted our presentations on InnoDB from the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. You can download these presentations by Heikki Tuuri, Ken Jacobs and Calvin Sun from the InnoDB website, as follows:

• Ken and Heikki: InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection
• Heikki: Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB
• Heikki: Concurrency Control: How it Really Works
• Calvin and Heikki: InnoDB File Formats and Source Code Structure

The description of these and other presentations about InnoDB are available here.

You’ll have a chance to dig deeper into the topics you’ve learned about for the first time at the conference, and can chat with Heikki Tuuri, Calvin Sun and Ken Jacobs and others about all things InnoDB.

Largely unstructured and open, we’ll discuss the latest version of the InnoDB Plugin and answer your technology questions about the newest InnoDB products. It’s also a great opportunity to network with other users and experts in InnoDB technology and learn about how to get the best out of MySQL for your application. Come ask questions and get answers about this technology that is so critical to YOUR success!

See you there!

Mark will deliver a keynote the on Google’s use of MySQL and InnoDB on Tuesday morning at the MySQL Conference, and another talk on Wednesday. As Mark says, “Although Innodb is not in the title, it is prominent in both of the talks I will do”:

• This is not a web app – the evolution of a MySQL deployment at Google Tues, 9am
• MySQL Performance on EC2 Wed, 3:05pm

Sorry the other post didn’t mention you, Mark. We won’t forget to be at BOTH your sessions, and we look forward to hearing what you have to say!

• Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection by Ken and Heikki, Tues, 11:55am
• Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB by Heikki, Wed, 2pm
• InnoDB Internals: InnoDB File Formats & Source Code Structure by Heikki and Calvin, Wed, 5:15pm
• Concurrency Control: How it Really Works by Heikki, Thurs, 2:50pm

Note the new times for the last two talks above. Be sure to check the conference schedule! Not much more to say about this topic, at least not here. Hear it all there!

Does your InnoDB-based application need more transactions to execute more quickly and reliably? Come hear these noted speakers present information that can help you get the most out of InnoDB:

• Distributed InnoDB Caching w/memcached — Matthew Yonkovit & Yves Trudeau (MySQL), Tue 2pm
• InnoDB database recovery techniques — Peter Zaitsev (MySQL Performance Blog), Wed 3:05pm
• High Availability & Scalability Patches from Google — Ben Handy & Justin Tolmer (Google), Wed 4:25pm
• InnoDB Performance & Usability Patches — Vadim Tkachenko & Yasufumi Kinoshita (Percona), Thu 2pm

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• Enhanced concurrency & scalability: the “Google SMP patch” using atomic instructions for mutexing
• More efficient memory allocation: ability to use more scalable platform memory allocator
• Improved out-of-the-box scalability: unlimited concurrent thread execution by default
• Dynamic tuning: at run-time, enable or disable insert buffering and adaptive hash indexing

These new performance features can yield up to twice the throughput or more, depending on your workload, platform and other tuning considerations. In another post, we explore some details about these changes, but first, what do these enhancements mean for performance and scalability?

In brief, we’ve tested three different workloads (joins, DBT2 OLTP and a modified sysbench) using a memory-resident database. In all cases, the InnoDB Plugin scales significantly better than the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.1. And in some cases, the absolute level of performance is dramatically higher too! The charts below illustrate the kinds of performance gains we’ve measured with release 1.0.3 of the InnoDB Plugin. Your mileage may vary, of course. See the InnoDB website for all the details on these tests.

This release of the InnoDB Plugin incorporates a patch made by Ben Handy and Mark Callaghan at Google to improve multi-core scalability by using more efficient synchronization methods (mutexing and rw-locks) to reduce cpu utilization and contention. We’re grateful for this contribution, and you will be too!

Now to our test results …

Joins: The following chart shows the performance gains in performing joins, comparing the built-in InnoDB in MySQL (in blue) with the InnoDB Plugin 1.0.3 (in red).

As you can see from the blue bars in the above chart, with MySQL 5.1 using the built-in InnoDB, the total number of joins the system can execute declines as the number of concurrent users increases. In contrast, the InnoDB Plugin slightly improves performance even with one user, and maintains performance as the number of users rises. This performance improvement is due in large part to the use of atomics for mutexing in the InnoDB Plugin.

Transaction Processing (DBT2): The following chart illustrates a scalability improvement using the OLTP read/write DBT2 benchmark, again comparing the performance of the built-in InnoDB in MySQL with the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.3.

Here, the InnoDB Plugin scales better than the built-in InnoDB from 16 to 32 users and produces about 12% more throughput with 64 concurrent users, as other bottlenecks are encountered or system capacity is reached. This improvement is likewise due primarily to the changes in mutexing.

Modified Sysbench: This test uses a version of the well-known sysbench workload, modified to include queries based on a secondary index, as suggested by Mark Callaghan of Google.

This time, the InnoDB Plugin shows significantly better scalability from 8 to 64 users than the built-in InnoDB in MySQL, yielding as much as 60% more throughput at 64 users. Like the previous examples, this improvement is largely due to the use of atomics for mutexing.

Modified Sysbench with tcmalloc: This test uses the same modified sysbench workload, but shows the difference between the built-in InnoDB (which uses the internal InnoDB memory allocator) and the InnoDB Plugin when using a more scalable memory allocator, in this case tcmalloc.

When the new configuration parameter innodb_use_sys_malloc is set to enable use of the memory allocator tcmalloc, the InnoDB Plugin really shines! Transaction throughput continues to scale, and the actual throughput with 64 users has nearly doubled!

We’ve borrowed the name “Transactions on” from the computer-science journal Transactions on Database Systems, published by the ACM society for computing professionals.  Like that journal, this blog will cover a wide range of database topics, specifically as they relate to InnoDB.

Users of InnoDB know a transaction is an atomic all-or-nothing set of changes made to a collection of data.  But according to Webster’s Dictionary, a transaction also is “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other”.  So, a transaction is also an exchange of ideas.

Welcome to this place to transact in ideas about InnoDB!