While researching partitioning performance (expect an article about this topic soon) I come across the news that the Falcon team has released a Falcon Feature Preview with the latest implementation.
The test I was running was based on 9 server instances , using different combinations of MyISAM, InnoDB, and Archive, with and without partitions.
Since I was at it, I quickly added three instances of MySQL 6.0.4 with Falcon (MySQL Sandbox is really handy in these cases) and added Falcon to the test bench.
As I expected, partitioned Falcon is not particularly impressive, but there was a serendipitous result. In addition to large data warehouse oriented queries, the test fires also 180 OLTP queries, with warm indexes, i.e. after the indexes have been cached in memory thanks to previous queries. The warm queries look like the following:

  SELECT * FROM flightstats
  WHERE AirlineID = '19386'
  AND UniqueCarrier = 'NW' AND Carrier = 'NW'
  AND FlightDate = '2002-10-01' AND FlightNum = '1017'
  AND DepTime = '2002-10-01 06:03:00'
  AND Origin = 'EWR' AND Dest = 'DTW'
  -- (all WHERE conditions belong to the PK)

Well, in these queries, Falcon outshines both MyISAM and InnoDB, as shown by the average times.

+----------+----------+----------+----------+
| count(*) | falcon   | myisam   | innodb   |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|      180 | 0.000254 | 0.002847 | 0.000302 |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+

Out of 180 OLTP queries, falcon was faster than MyISAM 143 times, and faster than InnoDB 176 times. The table holds 17 million recs (2 GB)

This is not a complete test. Just a result that I got by chance, but it’s nice to see that Falcon is advancing towards its maturity.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 23:20 and is filed under MySQL, MySQL technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.