Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL

Database scale-out architectures promise tremendous capacity increases simply by adding hardware. There are, however, significant differences depending on the scale-out approach you choose. This talk presents a new set of open source benchmarking tools called Bristlecone (http://bristlecone.continuent.org) that allow any user with access to Java to set up and start to run performance benchmarks in a few minutes.

The talk consists of the following parts.

1. Introduction. Discussion of database scale-out and some key measures of scale-out performance: read and write scaling, query latency (for proxy approaches), large vs. small transactions, and effects of datatypes like text and BLOBs.

2. Overview of the Bristlecone performance test tools. Evaluator creates mixed loads that stress system resources like CPU. Benchmark runs focused benchmarks with systematic variation of test input parameters. Each tool includes “portable benchmarks” that can be run within a few minutes of downloading, plus you can write more yourself.

3. Off to the Races. Results of running the portable benchmarks against a few of our favorite scale-out configurations, including MySQL proxy, database replication, and partitioning. If you are really good we will throw in results from PostgreSQL.

4 Conclusion. How to get the tools and start your own benchmarks today.

Bristlecone tools are available from http://bristlecone.continuent.org.