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Chapter 12: Future Directions

A solid foundation is essential for advancing MySQL towards more complex objectives. Once scalability and high availability are resolved, the focus could shift to the following development areas.

12.1 Improvements to Hypergraph Algorithms

The goal is to make hypergraph algorithms practical and enhance their performance, with a focus on exploring parallel approaches.

12.2 Practical Implementation of Paxos Log Persistence Functionality

Currently, Paxos log persistence has been demonstrated to be feasible. Efforts can be made to implement crash recovery based on Paxos logs, thereby making Paxos log persistence truly practical.

12.3 Addressing Concurrent View Change Challenges

Currently, Group Replication faces challenging concurrent view change problems. Although these issues occur infrequently, efforts can be made to solve them completely.

12.4 Further Improving Scalability

MySQL scalability can be further improved in the following areas:

  1. Eliminating additional latch bottlenecks, particularly in non-partitioned environments.
  2. Improving the stability of long-term performance testing.
  3. Improving MySQL’s NUMA-awareness in mainstream NUMA environments.
  4. Addressing Performance Schema’s adverse impact on NUMA environments during MySQL secondary replay processes.

12.5 Further Improving SQL Performance Under Low Concurrency

MySQL 8.0’s performance under low concurrency is significantly worse compared to 5.7, which needs to be corrected to avoid affecting users upgrading to 8.0.

12.6 Further Enhancing Performance of Analytical SQL Queries

Currently, MySQL processes individual SQL queries using a single-threaded mode, which can result in excessively long processing times for some statistical queries and significantly impact user experience. Future improvements will focus on implementing multi-threaded processing for statistical SQL queries to reduce processing times and enhance performance.

12.7 Improving Binlog File Compression Efficiency and Operational Stability

Reducing user storage costs is a key focus. Optimizing MySQL binlog compression rates and operational stability presents significant potential for improvement, which could lead to substantial benefits.

12.8 Advancing MySQL’s Management of Large Transactions on the Primary Server

In mainstream NUMA environments, MySQL’s primary server efficiency in handling large transactions is suboptimal. This area has significant optimization potential and could become one of the key points for future improvements.

12.9 Further Exploring Better Memory Allocation Tools

Currently, jemalloc 4.5 is the best-found memory allocation tool, but it has high memory consumption and instability on ARM architecture. A key future focus could be developing a more efficient and stable memory allocation tool.

12.10 Integrating a High-Performance File System

Enhancing MySQL with a better file system, especially improving the performance of MySQL secondary replay.

12.11 Introducing AI into MySQL Systems

Integrating AI with MySQL for automated knob tuning and learning-based database monitoring could be another key focus for the future.

12.11.1 Knob Tuning

Integrating AI for parameter optimization can significantly reduce DBA workload. Key parameters suitable for AI-driven optimization include:

  1. Buffer pool size
  2. Spin delay settings
  3. Dynamic transaction throttling limits based on environment
  4. Dynamic XCom cache size adjustment
  5. MySQL secondary worker max queue size
  6. The number of Paxos pipelining instances and the size of batching
  7. Automatic parameter adjustments under heavy load to improve processing capability

12.11.2 Learning-based Database Monitoring

AI could optimize database monitoring by determining the optimal times and methods for tracking various database metrics.

12.12 Summary

Programming demands strong logical reasoning skills, crucial for problem-solving, algorithm design, debugging, code comprehension, performance optimization, and testing. It helps in analyzing problems, creating solutions, correcting errors, and ensuring software reliability. Developing logical reasoning is essential for programmers to think systematically and build efficient, reliable software [56].

MySQL development often focuses primarily on simple tests using testing tools, which can miss opportunities to discover many problems. Testing MySQL itself is a monumental task, and relying solely on testing tools is insufficient to expose all problems. Optimization differs across projects and environments, and using real online traffic makes it more targeted and effective. Thus, MySQL optimization based on live traffic is highly valuable.

MySQL performance optimization heavily relies on mitigating scalability problems. Enhanced versions of MySQL have addressed most scalability problems, establishing a solid foundation for further optimizations. Profile-guided optimization (PGO) is crucial for MySQL, and as scalability problems improve, its importance will continue to grow. Utilizing better memory allocation tools can significantly improve the performance of both the MySQL primary and secondary replay.

We firmly believe that high availability solutions based on Paxos log persistence will be the future trend. Our extensive experience in the long-term transformation of Group Replication has laid a solid foundation for achieving true high availability. The speed of MySQL secondary replay determines the quality of MySQL’s high availability. Achieving replay speeds in the range of millions of tpmC is possible but requires persistent effort.

Although MySQL optimization is a long and winding process, we are confident that MySQL will continue to improve over time.

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