VLDB & MySQL in China

I am at VLDB in Hangzhou, China and spoke with clever people from academia, industrial research labs, industry and even web scale companies. A co-worker setup meetings with people who make MySQL better including Zhejiang University, Alibaba, Taobao & NetEase. We had another meeting with expert DBAs in Shanghai. These were interesting meetings.

There is a lot of great work done to make MySQL better at these companies. While I have been aware of this, I missed the extent of the effort -- both improvements made to MySQL and the complexity of the workload. I hope we can do more to engage these web-scale MySQL teams in the community. We all benefit by making MySQL better -- adding features, fixing bugs faster, explaining best practices. Engagement can mean speaking at conferences, blogging and sharing code (github, launchpad). Everyone benefits when patches are pushed upstream - the diff contributor gets to shrink their diff and maintenance overhead.

I am impressed by the work of the MySQL teams from Alibaba and Taobao. They have a lot in common with the teams I have been on. Operations and engineering work together and engineering learns what needs to be made better. Running a DBMS in production is a great education that many developers do not get at traditional (commercial) DBMS companies. They also confront many performance problems from high-throughput workloads that require them to get more from InnoDB, even as the Oracle/InnoDB team continues to make it much more efficient.

A frequent topic was the excellent new replication features in MySQL 5.6. I did not find anyone using them. They were reluctant for good reasons, some of which will be explained in a post to be published real soon now by my co-workers. We think their concerns have been addressed by changes in WebScaleSQL and upstream MySQL. It will take time to get that message out.

There were also questions about improvements to InnoDB in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6. People want to know whether InnoDB scales better (to more cores). The short answer is yes. Each release from 5.1 to 5.5 to 5.6 and now to 5.7 has significant changes that reduce mutex contention. The end result is that 5.7 will get more QPS than earlier releases on a big multi-core server. MySQL marketing has been gettting this message out, but marketing is hard and the message needs to be repeated.