MySQL 5.4 Acknowledgements

The work started when MySQL was acquired by Sun has now started to bear
fruit. Very soon after the acquisition a Sun team was formed to assist
the MySQL performance team on improving the scalability of the MySQL
server. At the same time also Google have been very active in improving
scalability of InnoDB. MySQL 5.4 scalability improvements is very much
the result of the efforts from the MySQL Performance team, the Sun
performance team and the Google efforts.

It's extremely fruitful to work with such a competent set of people. The
Sun team has experience from scaling Oracle, DB2, Informix and so forth
and knows extremely well how the interaction of software and hardware
affects performance. The Google patches have shown themselves to be of
excellent quality. From our internal testing we found two bugs in the
early testing and both those had already been fixed by the Google team
and so turnaround time was a day or two. For the last months we haven't
found any issues. The MySQL performance team have also been able to add
a few small but effective improvements on top of the Google patches.

MySQL 5.4 also introduces DTrace support in the MySQL Server. This code
is a result of a cooperation with the MySQL 6.0 development team, the
original patch was developed for 6.0. We have spent quite some time
on getting the DTrace support working on all variants of Solaris and
Mac OS X platforms. For anyone interested in getting DTrace probes into
their application I think the MySQL example is probably the most
advanced example currently available on user-level DTrace probes and
building such DTrace probes into a complex build system.

Working with competent and motivated people is always great fun, so this
has been a very rewarding project for me personally. I have always liked
to work on performance improvements, in my work on founding
MySQL Cluster we were involved in many such efforts and so far they have
almost always been successful. Actually we're releasing a new version
of MySQL Cluster 7.0 now as well with its own set of extreme performance
improvements which I will mention in a separate blog.