Great to see the new OpenSolaris Database community! I am however sorry to see that MySQL does not yet seem to be represented. I both work for MySQL and have been lucky enough to continue my work as a freelance writer. For MySQL, I work in the documentation team with responsibility for keeping the storage engine, replication, connectors/APIs and internal documentation up to date. As a freelance writer, I've been writing books and articles on a range of topics for the last seven years, including many on Solaris and Sun hardware.
I have written many times on the performance of Solaris, particularly with the Niagara and the Cool Tools stack (for example, see http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/3857) and in the past on the AMD based servers (X2100, v40z). Currently, I'm in the process of doing more detailed testing on the T1000 and an Ultra 20M2. For both, the primary goal is determine the best combination of OS parameters and application configuration that give the best performance. There are some key areas of consideration in my mind for databases within the Solaris/OpenSolaris environment: - Networking performance; the recent improvements in the networking stack have made a noticeable difference. After talking to Denis Sheahan at Sun on Thursday, the difference in performance of different network hardware and the associated drivers is also a key concern. - Scheduling/threading model; there must be sensible limits and parameters that squeeze the best performance out of any system. - Comparison of ZFS/ufs performance. I'd particularly like to see if there is a performance gain/tradeoff when using different file systems for separate areas of the DB path. For example, traditionally you would place DB logs and data on separate devices to lower disk contention and improve performance. I don't yet know whether this is still true with ZFS. Alternatively, it may be better to use separate ZFS pools for these components, or even a ufs-based log and a ZFS-based data volume. Has anybody here had a chance to do such detailed testing? MC -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
