2023-04-12 Databases on Arm discussions - public meeting

 Agenda

• Introductions
• Open discussion on databases issues
• AOB

Documents

• Meeting recording: https://linaro-org.zoom.us/rec/share/D-w2RdTSy4upcYY950wp6tlIuQfa6FGAM7xc-sYzGVExbeTq2-iHIhHRAB9mOVlE.4wWeQVEkT5pPd1sv?startTime=1681286665000
• Passcode: v9Mq1%cV

Action Items

• Yibo Cai: Bring list of issues currently faced with MySQL to the next meeting.
• Huawei and Alibaba: Bring list of issues currently faced with MySQL to the next meeting.
• Leonardo Garcia: set up recurrent meetings every two weeks.
• Leonardo Garcia: send communication to the Linaro open discussion mailing list saying that we will use it to eventually have some database discussions as well.

Minutes

• Introductions
  
  • Arm
    • Ashok Bhat
      • Senior Project Manager in Infrastructure Software (networking, server, HPC).
      • Interest: Make open source databases good. Works with closed source databases as well, using the knowledge acquired with the open source databases.
    • Yibo Cai
      • Major database contributor and expert from Arm. Have been working with profiling and optimization of MySQL on ARm. Have already contributed some patches to MySQL.
    • Willen Yang
      • Works on the Open Source Software Group.
      • Technology manager for network, containers and general workloads, such as databases. Manage the technical requirements and roadmaps for these projects. Currently working on MySQL optimization on Arm. Want to explore the collaboration opportunities in this software ecosystem with Linaro and their partners.
    • Jun He
      • Works with Willen and Yibo.
      • Works with storage devices and big data. MySQL is one of the key components they are looking at, specially w.r.t. performance investigation.
  • Huawei
    • Jonathan Cameron
      • Bridge person, pulling the right people into the discussion.
    • Alexander Isaev
      • Part of the computing team. Working on performance analysis for databases, big data applications, and cloud stuff.
      • Interested in MySQL and other databases we might look at.
    • Zhikun zhu
      • Interested in optimising cloud workloads, including databases.
    • Yefeng
      • Optimization and profiling of MySQL and other cloud workloads.
    • Yangyicong
      • Interested in how to improve MySQL performance in their servers.
    • Zhou Nan
      • Contact person to Linaro.
    • Zhenyu Zheng
      • Maintainer for OpenEuler database SIG.
      • https://gitee.com/src-openeuler/mysql/tree/openEuler-23.03/
  • Fujitsu
    • Kamatsuka-san
      • Compiler team at Fujitsu.
      • Interested to know what kind of issues on databases on Arm.
      • Interested in data center usage for the upcoming Fujitsu CPU.
  • Linaro
    • Leonardo Garcia
      • Chair of the Linaro Data Center Group.
      • Facilitator for this meeting.
    • Shimada-san
      • Linaro country manager for Japan.
      • Worked with Oracle in the past, with Oracle databases and PostgreSQL. Has knowledge of MySQL as well.
      • Has been working with Fujitsu for a long time in his career.
    • Joyce Qi
      • Business Development.
  • Alibaba
  • Yang Pingchao
    •  MySQL is their major workload.
  • Jin
• Open discussion on databases issues
  • [Leonardo] Welcome everybody to this first Databases on Arm discussion public meeting. The meeting is being recorded. As this is a public meeting, please do not share any confidential information here.
  • [Leonardo] What databases each of the companies are working on and a brief description of what you have been involved with recently.
  • [Yibo] Recently doing performance related optimization for MySQL.
  • [Yibo] MySQL is not a very open community. They just accept what is critical. Latest performance analysis shows that overall performance is good on OLTP write-only workloads (main focus), but there might still be some areas for improvement.
  • [Ashok] Talked to MySQL product manager. Tried to explain the outstanding patches Arm has. If it is bug fix, they will take it, but if it is a performance enhancement, they will only get it if it is a huge performance issue (only more than 5% difference). They also don't take refactoring kinds of patches.
  • [Ashok] https://mysqlonarm.github.io/ lists a bunch of issues that Huawei identified some time ago. Kurnal Bauskar, the author of the website, used to work for Huawei and is now at Google.
  • [Leonardo] I tried to invite him, but I'm not sure if he missed it because of the Zoom meeting ID issue we had in the beginning of the meeting.
  • [Ashok] Does Huawei still think the issues on the website exist?
  • [Yibo] Some issues are already fixed in MySQL.
  • [Ashok] Instead of reviewing the list of https://mysqlonarm.github.io/ outstanding issues, let's start fresh with a list from Huawei and Yibo of known issues today.
  • Ashok shared notes that he received a few months ago from a MySQL Project Manager at Oracle.

•  
  • [Yibo] What compiler flags do they use to build?
  • [Ashok] RHEL 9 gcc compiler available in the distro, with the same flags in the open source project.
  • [Yibo] That is -O2 today.
  • [Jonathan] Huawei would have problems testing on the platforms required by the MySQL community. IOW, they would need help from others to test on the specific platforms required by Oracle.
  • [Ashok] Arm and others might be able to help with testing provided we have bugs opened in the public with patches and the information needed to reproduce the issue.
  • [Shimada-san] Why did we start with MySQL?
  • [Ashok] MySQL and Postgres are 70% of the open source databases market, with MySQL having a major slice of this share.
  • [Shimada-san] Why is noSQL not the focus here?
  • [Ashok] There are blog posts about noSQL performance. We are starting with MySQL because that is what we all have been involved with and we suspect there is room for improvement on it. But there is work on MongoDB, Postgres as well. We can discuss any of them.
  • [Leonardo] Isn't MariaDB an alternative as a more easy to access community?
  • [Ashok] Good point. Issues in MySQL are usually issues in MaraiDB as well.
  • [Leonardo] Is lack of support for MariaDB a problem?
  • [Ashok] Lack of support is not a problem as MariaDB Foundation is providing support for MariaDB.
  • [Ashok] Are there any new features that need to be added to hardware that would help database performance? Arm wants this kind of feedback.
  • [Ashok] Agenda for next meeting. Yibo, will Arm be able to share what problems they are seeing?
  • [Yibo] Will introduce the current work on MySQL.
  • [Jonathan] We should have a mailing list for the offline discussions.
  • [Leonardo] We can use a new one or an existing one.
  • [Jonathan] We should use the linaro-open-discussions mailing list as there are some Oracle folks there (working on kernel, but might be able to make connections if needed).
• AOB