Manual for benchmark toolset dbt2-0.37.50.15

Manual for dbt2-0.37.50.15

My career has been focused on two important aspects of DBMSs. The
first is the recovery algorithms to enable the DBMS to never be down.
The second is efficient execution of OLTP in the DBMS.

When I started a short career as a consultant in 2006 I noted that I had
to spend more and more time setting up and tearing down NDB Clusters
to perform benchmarks.

The particular benchmark I started developing was DBT2. I downloaded
the dbt2-0.37 version. I quickly noted that it was very hard to run a
benchmark in this version in an automated manner.

My long-term goal was to achieve a scenario where an entire benchmark
could be executed with only command. This goal took several years to
achieve and many versions of this new dbt2-0.37 tree.

Since I automated more and more, the scripts I developed are layered
such that I have base scripts that execute start and stop of individual
nodes. On top of this script I have another script that can start and
stop a cluster of nodes. In addition I have a set of scripts that execute
benchmarks. On top of all those scripts I have a script that executes
the entire thing.

The dbt2-0.37.50 tree also fixed one bug in the benchmark execution and
ensured that I could handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second
and still handle the statistics in the benchmark.

Later I also added support for executing Sysbench and flexAsynch. Sysbench
support was added by forking sysbench-0.4.12 and fixing some scalability
issues in the benchmark and added support for continuous updates of
performance (defaults to one report per 3 seconds).

Today I view the dbt2-0.37.50 tree and sysbench-0.4.12 as my toolbox.
It would be quite time consuming to analyse any new features from a
performance point of view without this tool. This means that I think
it is worthwhile to continue developing this toolset for my own purposes.

About 10 years ago we decided to make this toolset publically available
at the MySQL website. One reason for this was to ensure that anyone
that wants to replicate the benchmarks that I report on my blog is able to
do this.

Currently my focus is on developing MySQL Cluster and thus the focus
on the development of this toolset is centered around these 3 benchmarks
with NDB. But the benchmark scripts still support running Sysbench and
DBT2 for InnoDB as well. I used to develop InnoDB performance
improvements as well for a few years (and MySQL server improvements)
and this toolset was equally important at that time.

When I wrote my book I decided to write a chapter to document this
toolset. This chapter of my book is really helpful to myself. It is easy
to forget some detail of how to use it.

Above is a link to the PDF file of this chapter if anyone wants to
try out and use these benchmark toolsets.

My last set of benchmark blogs on benchmarks of MySQL Cluster
in the Oracle Cloud used these benchmark scripts.

The toolset is not intended for production setups of NDB, but I am
sure it can be used for this with some adaption of the scripts.

For development setups of MySQL Cluster we are developing
MySQL Cluster Configurator (MCC) sometimes called
Auto Installer.

For production setups of NDB we are developing MySQL Cluster
Manager (MCM).

Happy benchmarking :)

Use cases for MySQL Cluster

Third chapter of "MySQL Cluster 7.5 inside and out".

NDB was designed for a number of networking applications. In particular the original
design focused a lot on telecom applications. The telecom applications have extreme
requirements on availability, many networking applications as well.

This chapter goes through a number of application types where NDB have been used
and also uses a number of public examples of use cases.

These application types include DNS servers, DHCP servers, Intelligent Network (IN)
applications, 3G/4G/5G applications, RADIUS servers, number portability, DIAMETER
server, Video-on-demand applications, Payment Gateways, Software Defined
Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Voice over IP.

In addition also many internet applications such as Gaming servers, financial
applications such as stock quote servers, whitelist/blacklist handling. eCommerce
applications, payment services, web applications, fraud detection, online banking,
session database.

In addition a number of frameworks have used NDB and presented it publically such
as a GE presentation, HopsFS (Hadoop distribution), HopsYARN, Oracle OpenStack
and OpenLDAP.

With the possibility to handle more data in MySQL Cluster 7.6 it is likely that this
list of application types will grow even more.

Rationale for MySQL Cluster

Second chapter of "MySQL Cluster 7.5 inside and out".

When I started developing the ideas for NDB Cluster in my Ph.D studies
about 25 years ago, the first thing I did was to perform a very thorough
study of the requirements.

At that time I participated in a European Research for UMTS. UMTS was
later marketed as 3G. My part of this big study group of more than 100
researchers was to simulate the network behaviour. We used the
protocols developed by other groups to see what the load would be on
the various nodes in the telecom network.

I was mostly interested in the load it contributed to the network databases.
Through these studies and also by studying the AXE system developed
in Ericsson I got a very good picture of the requirements on a DBMS
to be used for future telecom services.

In parallel with this I also studied a number of other areas such as
multimedia email servers, news-on-demand servers, genealogy
servers that would be other popular services in the telecom network.

In the above chapter I go through how those requirements was turned
into requirements on predictable response times, availability requirements,
throughput requirements and so forth.

In particular how the requirement led to a model that divided the Data
Server functionality (NDB data nodes) and the Query Server
functionality (MySQL Server nodes).

Also how predictable response times are achieved by building on ideas
from the AXE architecture developed in Ericsson.

What is special with MySQL Cluster

The first chapter from the book "MySQL Cluster 7.5 inside and out".
This chapter presents a number of key features that makes NDB
unique.