Comments on: The MySQL ARCHIVE storage engine – Alternatives

By: saloni shirodkar

saloni shirodkar — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:03:43 +0000

We are not currently using the Archive storage engine, but have done some research on it. One requirement of our application is that it stores lots of historical information for long periods of time. That data is never updated, but needs to be selected occasionally.

By: amar

amar — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 08:38:38 +0000

toku db seems to be very efficient than those of others.

By: Brano

Brano — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 11:07:07 +0000

TokuDB seems like really good engine. I wish I could use it on OSX (devel) and FREEBSD (server).

By: Paul Kamp

Paul Kamp — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:12:22 +0000

@Przemysław, nice write up. Have you looked at other database engines and how they compare across a number of different metrics? InnoDB and MyISAM are fairly mature.

I started working with WiredTiger recently and they are showing some interesting results with their preliminary testing with MySQL when compared to InnoDB and LevelDB.

http://wiredtiger.com/products/performance/

I’d like to learn a bit more about how performance dynamics may change across applications and functions. What have you seen?

By: Przemysław Malkowski

Przemysław Malkowski — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:18:31 +0000

@Rick, this was on InnoDB 5.5.30 and Tokudb 7.1.0. The same table on InnoDB 5.6.16 is innodb_compression_level=6 (default):
1072MB with KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8
592MB with KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4
Changing compression level to 9 did not change anything in result size in this case.

By: Tim Callaghan

Tim Callaghan — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 01:08:31 +0000

@RickJames, MySQL 5.6 can reduce the performance hit of compression by via dynamic padding, but keep in mind that any padding of the 16K block itself will eat into the InnoDB cache and thus mean less cache hits. It’s a trade-off. Also, the only improvement to compressibility that I’ve seen is that you can now define the zlib level, but increasing it will increase CPU consumption and likely lower performance, again a trade-off.

As for TokuDB’s availability in MariaDB right now, that is true. There is partial TokuDB functionality in MariaDB 5.5, and full functionality in MariaDB 10. See their knowledge base for more information at http://mariadb.com/kb/en/tokudb-differences/

By: Rick James

Rick James — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:26:56 +0000

Which 5.x version did you measure against? Oracle recently made some significant improvements in InnoDB compression, both in speed and compressibility.

MariaDB already includes TokuDB, so you don’t need to wait for Percona. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-5536-release-notes/

By: Przemysław Malkowski

Przemysław Malkowski — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 14:08:09 +0000

@Vladislav, TokuDB uses compression by default and according to Tokutek, you don’t have to make a compromise between speed and disk space savings. So my point was that this engine may be a good choice not only for archiving old data, but also for usual workloads. Check out this for instance: http://www.tokutek.com/2012/09/three-ways-that-fractal-tree-indexes-improve-ssd-for-mysql/

@Nils, you are right, and I expect everyone at least reads documentation before using a new toy in a production environment 😉

By: Nils

Nils — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:54:57 +0000

You’d probably want to check out the TokuDB documentation, especially tokudb_cache_size if you just want to use it for archiving, as it would reserve half of physical memory otherwise.

By: Vladislav Rastrusny

Vladislav Rastrusny — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 08:27:39 +0000

What can be the reason for storing data both compressed and on SSD? If you store data compressed, probably, you don’t need it very often (because decompression will take CPU cycles). So, you can store it on a slower storage like regular HDD, right?

By: Justin Swanhart

Justin Swanhart — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 22:27:57 +0000

It would have been nice if InnoDB has added the “change log” for their ALTER TABLE as an open interface in the server than any engine could use. As it stands, TokuDB could probably create a changelog table similar to the FlexCDC log tables, then apply the changes after the ALTER completed. New transactions might have to read from the log too. This would be very flexible and similar to the InnoDB change buffer.

By: Przemysław Malkowski

Przemysław Malkowski — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 22:18:31 +0000

@Tim, thank you, I’ve updated the post accordingly.
Btw. the ability to online expand int to bigint of an auto_increment PK would be awesome to have.

By: Tim Callaghan

Tim Callaghan — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 22:01:10 +0000

We refer to it as “hot column expansion” and it’s covered in section 3.4 of our documentation (we are currently reworking our documentation, after which I’ll be able to give a URL to the exact section), for now I’ll just past in the relevant section text:

“Hot column expansion operations are only supported to char, varchar, varbinary, and integer data types. Hot column expansion is not supported if the given column is part of the primary key or any secondary keys.”

By: Przemysław Malkowski

Przemysław Malkowski — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:57:20 +0000

@Schlomi, @Justin, thank you for valuable notes. Indeed I didn’t want to go into much details, since this post was meant to focus mostly on compression aspect.

@Tim, thank you for clarifications, however I could not find the details about online expanding data types in TokuDB, could you point me to the documentation?
Unfortunately I did not take a notes for this particular test performance numbers as it was not the goal of this post, but at least I can confirm altering to TokuDB was much faster then to compressed InnoDB. Besides there were posts on that already here, like: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/29/considering-tokudb-as-an-engine-for-timeseries-data/

By: Justin Swanhart

Justin Swanhart — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:08:14 +0000

Shlomi,

For some use-cases it is a MyISAM or an InnoDB replacement. For others, where FK are an absolute deal breaker, it can not be an InnoDB alternative.

So discussing TokuDB in the context of ARCHIVE replacement does not mean it is only good as an ARCHIVE replacement. As you noted, we’ve talked about (and I imagine will continue to talk about) TokuDB in the context of many workloads.

It should of course be noted that TokuDB does not support the WORM (write-once, read many) properly of ARCHIVE.

By: Tim Callaghan

Tim Callaghan — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 20:56:59 +0000

Nice writeup/analysis, just a few clarifications about TokuDB:

– Yes, file names are obfuscated after a slow alter operation, but you can always get a mapping of database/table to file name using information_schema.tokudb_file_map
– TokuDB also supports online DDL for “expanding” integer and char/varchar/varbinary column types.

Lastly, strictly comparing raw compression without measuring it’s impact on performance can be misleading. Do you have performance numbers for this test?

By: Normann

Normann — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 20:24:19 +0000

im waiting for an Percona Server 5.6.x with TokuDB GA to test it 🙂

By: Shlomi Noach

Shlomi Noach — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 18:41:37 +0000

Worth noting that TokuDB does not support foreign keys.
On compression it’s worth noting that ALTER TABLE into TokuDB with high compression is way faster than ALTE RTABLE into innodb with mild compression.

Last, though I perfectly understand the topic and cause of this post (finding an engine with good compression), calling TokuDB “an ARCHIVE alternative” is so amusing (“what? no ARCHIVE left on the shelf? Gosh, I guess I’ll have to do with the supported, faster, smaller, transactional, acid compliant, online-ddl, open source, cheap wannabe engine called TokuDB”)…

Last-last, worth noting that mixture of InnoDB & TokuDB requires carefull memory allocations.