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Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

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Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#12
post #11

For context: Faster indexing and numa awareness is in MySQL 5.7. The parallel read-ahead is a Facebook patch. Aurora is based on MySQL 5.6.

So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version of MySQL under the hood?

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#13
post #12
post #11

For context: Faster indexing and numa awareness is in MySQL 5.7. The parallel read-ahead is a Facebook patch. Aurora is based on MySQL 5.6.

So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version of MySQL under the hood?

It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it.

They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version of MySQL under the hood?

It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it. They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds

Sure it does. You can see this from diagnostic commands (Innodb status, mutexes etc)

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it. They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds

Sure it does. You can see this from diagnostic commands (Innodb status, mutexes etc)

Really? Werner Vogels said they built a totally different logging and storage layer.

Also a good bit of video of Vogels talking about Aurora.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE-hU&feature=youtu.be...

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. You can see this from diagnostic commands (Innodb status, mutexes etc)

Really? Werner Vogels said they built a totally different logging and storage layer. Also a good bit of video of Vogels talking about Aurora. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE-hU&feature=youtu.be...

Logging and storage being new does not mean it does not share a lot of other internals.

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. I'd switch over from RDS to Aurora in a heartbeat if AWS built a postgres frontend for it.

Curious what is the key feature of Aurora on Postgres that you'd want?

PostGIS compatibility.

Unless you mean that the other way around, in which case I don't know what key features of Aurora I'm missing (besides price & performance).

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#18
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't live without the occasional JSONB anymore. Some can't live without Aurora anymore ;) - they start their projects with MySQL(even thought they prefer Postgresql) to be Aurora compatible, just in case they need it.

I'm curious what are the reasons some people "can't live without Aurora anymore". I would love to hear specific benefits of Aurora, regarding performance or other aspects. The comparisons I could find didn't seem to be very favorable to Aurora (mainly that the claimed 5x improvement does not show up in the benchmarks)

The big win for me is administration, not performance.

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#19
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version of MySQL under the hood?

It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it. They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds

Aurora is a modified MySQL 5.6.10. It shares several bugs with 5.6.10 that have already been fixed in later versions of MySQL. My understanding is that it mostly remains unchanged other than the massive enhancements Amazon has made to the I/O performance.

Re: Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness

#20
We've switched 6 or 7 of our production databases to Aurora now. It is much faster than MySQL/Percona Server. Even highly optimized MySQL installs with FusionIO cards struggled to keep up before we switched to Aurora.

Aurora is expensive, but it's a huge instant speedup and easily worth the cost for anyone with a production application that occasionally hits performance limitations on traditional MySQL.

That said, it is based on MySQL 5.6.10, so we are missing some features like online DDL from 5.6.17. Many bugs from 5.6.10 have been resolved upstream but are still present in Aurora. [0] It's also subject to the usual limitations of RDS (no SUPER, no access to the binary database files, no innobackupex).

[0] https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/16/amazon-aurora-lookin...

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