Percona Live MySQL Conference 2012 – Day 0 Review

Day 0 of the MySQL Conference is a day unlike any other day. It is, in fact, tutorial day. While regular days of the Percona Live MySQL Conference feature 50 minute sessions, usually split into 40 minute talk and a 5-10 minute question period, tutorials are 3 hour long sessions (with a generous 10 minute break in the middle for those that wish to go to the WC) that provide an in-depth dive into some aspect of MySQL. Due to the length of the tutorials, they are more in-depth and technical than individual sessions can provide, but at the same time we are limited to 2 tutorials slots per day instead of the 5 session slots per day.

The tutorial schedule for the conference is located here and with so many good ones, it was hard to choose which one(s) to go to.

For the morning session, I attended Peter Zaitev’s tutorial entitled  ”InnoDB and XtraDB Architecture and Performance Optimization”. As must of us know, Peter Zaitev is the CEO and Co-Founder of Percona and an expert in InnoDB/XtraDB architecture, performance, and optimization. The session was quite good and informative. Peter went over the core InnoDB/XtraDB options in regards to performance and even some of the more. It was interesting to learn some of the more exotic options available in XtraDB (Percona’s variant of InnoDB with performance improvements) such as the ALL_O_DIRECT option for innodb_flush_method and how it impacts performance. Considering that the vast majority of the deployments of MySQL in businesses use InnoDB, the talk is quite relevant and informative.

For the afternoon session I attended “Linux and H/W optimizations for MySQL” by Yoshinori Matsunobu of Facebook. If I had to say one thing about this session, it would be one giant info dump and I need another 30 hours to study the numbers. Yoshinori compared MySQL performance across various hardware configurations, software configuration, memory settings, version of MySQL, MySQL configurations, etc, and gathered some interesting and sometime unintuitive numbers. He also showed how modern hardware amplified  the replication lag issue which is common to slaves in MySQL and how to deal with it by judiciously using SSDs.