My previous post was an introduction to the TokuDB storage engine and aimed at explaining the basics of its design and how it differentiates from InnoDB/XtraDB. This post is all about motivating you to give it a try and have a look for yourself. Percona Server is not officially supporting TokuDB as of today, though the guys in the development team are working hard on this and the first GA release of Percona Server with TokuDB is looming on the horizon. However, there’s a beta version available now. For the installation tests in this post I’ve used the latest version of Percona Server alongside the accompanying TokuDB complement, which was published last week.

Installing Percona Server with TokuDB on a sandbox

One of the tools Percona Support Engineers really love is Giuseppe Maxia’s MySQL Sandbox. It allows us to setup a sandbox running a MySQL instance of our choice and makes executing multiple ones for testing purposes very easily. Whenever a customer reaches us with a problem happening on a particular version of MySQL or Percona Server that we can reproduce, we quickly spin off a new sandbox and test it ourselves, so it’s very handy. I’ll use one here to explore this beta version of Percona Server with TokuDB but if you prefer you can install it the regular way using a package from our apt experimental or yum testing repositories.

We start by downloading the tarballs from here: TokuDB’s plugin has been packaged in its own tarball, so there are two to download. Once you get them let’s decompress both and create a unified working directory, compressing it again to create a single tarball we’ll use as source to create our sandbox:

[nando@test01 ~]# tar zxvf Percona-Server-5.6.17-rel66.0-608.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz
[nando@test01 ~]# tar zxvf Percona-Server-5.6.17-rel66.0-608.TokuDB.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz
[nando@test01 ~]# tar cfa Percona-Server-5.6.17-rel66.0-608.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz Percona-Server-5.6.17-rel66.0-608.Linux.x86_64/

Before going ahead, verify if you have transparent huge pages enabled as TokuDB won’t run if it is set. See this documentation page for explanation on what this is and how to disable it on Ubuntu. In my CentOS test server it was defined in a slightly different place and I’ve done the following to temporarily disable it:

[nando@test01]# echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled
[nando@test01]# echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/defrag

We’re now ready to create our sandbox. The following command should be enough (I’ve chosen to run Percona Server on port 5617, you can use any other available one):

[nando@test01 ~]# make_sandbox Percona-Server-5.6.17-rel66.0-608.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz -- --sandbox_directory=tokudb --sandbox_port=5617

If the creation process goes well you will see something like the following at the end:

.... sandbox server started
Your sandbox server was installed in $HOME/sandboxes/tokudb

You should now be able to access the MySQL console on the sandbox with the default credentials; if you cannot, verify the log-in $HOME/sandboxes/tokudb/data/msandbox.err:

[nando@test01 ~]# mysql --socket=/tmp/mysql_sandbox5617.sock -umsandbox -pmsandbox

Alternatively, you can make use of the “use” script located inside the sandbox directory, which employs the same credentials (configured in the client section of the configuration file my.sandbox.cnf):

[nando@test01 ~]# cd sandboxes/tokudb/
[nando@test01 tokudb]# ./use

First thing to check is if TokuDB is being listed as an available storage engine:

mysql> SHOW ENGINES;
+--------------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+
| Engine             | Support | Comment                                                                    | Transactions | XA   | Savepoints |
+--------------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+
| (...)              | (...)   | (...)                                                                      | (...)        | (...)| (...)      |
| TokuDB             | YES     | Tokutek TokuDB Storage Engine with Fractal Tree(tm) Technology             | YES          | YES  | YES        |
| InnoDB             | DEFAULT | Percona-XtraDB, Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys | YES          | YES  | YES        |
| (...)          | (...)       | (...)                                                                      | NO           | (...)| (...)      |
+--------------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+

If that’s not the case, you may need to load the plugins manually – I had to do so in my sandbox; you may not need if you’re installing it from a package in a fresh setup:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';

TokuDB should now figure in the list of supported ENGINES but you still need to activate the related plugins:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_file_map SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_fractal_tree_info SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_fractal_tree_block_map SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_trx SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_locks SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN tokudb_lock_waits SONAME 'ha_tokudb.so';

Please note the INSTALL PLUGIN action results in permanent changes and thus is required only once. No modifications to MySQL’s configuration file are required to have those plugins load in subsequent server restarts.

Now you should see not only the main TokuDB plugin but also the add-ons to the INFORMATION SCHEMA:

mysql> SHOW PLUGINS;
+-------------------------------+----------+--------------------+--------------+---------+
| Name                          | Status   | Type               | Library      | License |
+-------------------------------+----------+--------------------+--------------+---------+
| (...)                         | (...)    | (...)              | (...)        | (...)   |
| TokuDB                        | ACTIVE   | STORAGE ENGINE     | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_trx                    | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_locks                  | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_lock_waits             | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_file_map               | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_fractal_tree_info      | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
| TokuDB_fractal_tree_block_map | ACTIVE   | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_tokudb.so | GPL     |
+-------------------------------+----------+--------------------+--------------+---------+

We are now ready to create our first TokuDB table – the only different thing to do here is to specify TokuDB as the storage engine to use:

mysql> CREATE TABLE test.Numbers (id INT PRIMARY KEY, number VARCHAR(20)) ENGINE=TokuDB;

Note some unfamiliar files lying in the datadir; the details surrounding those is certainly good material for future posts:

[nando@test01]# ls ~/sandboxes/tokudb/data
auto.cnf                   _test_Numbers_main_3_2_19.tokudb
ibdata1                    _test_Numbers_status_3_1_19.tokudb
ib_logfile0                tokudb.directory
ib_logfile1                tokudb.environment
log000000000000.tokulog25  __tokudb_lock_dont_delete_me_data
msandbox.err               __tokudb_lock_dont_delete_me_environment
mysql                      __tokudb_lock_dont_delete_me_logs
mysql_sandbox5617.pid      __tokudb_lock_dont_delete_me_recovery
performance_schema         __tokudb_lock_dont_delete_me_temp
tc.log                     tokudb.rollback
test

Configuration: what’s really important

As noted by Vadim long ago, “Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there’re only a few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box things running pretty well“:

mysql> show variables like 'tokudb_%';
+---------------------------------+------------------+
| Variable_name                   | Value            |
+---------------------------------+------------------+
| tokudb_alter_print_error        | OFF              |
| tokudb_analyze_time             | 5                |
| tokudb_block_size               | 4194304          |
| tokudb_cache_size               | 522651648        |
| tokudb_check_jemalloc           | 1                |
| tokudb_checkpoint_lock          | OFF              |
| tokudb_checkpoint_on_flush_logs | OFF              |
| tokudb_checkpointing_period     | 60               |
| tokudb_cleaner_iterations       | 5                |
| tokudb_cleaner_period           | 1                |
| tokudb_commit_sync              | ON               |
| tokudb_create_index_online      | ON               |
| tokudb_data_dir                 |                  |
| tokudb_debug                    | 0                |
| tokudb_directio                 | OFF              |
| tokudb_disable_hot_alter        | OFF              |
| tokudb_disable_prefetching      | OFF              |
| tokudb_disable_slow_alter       | OFF              |
| tokudb_disable_slow_update      | OFF              |
| tokudb_disable_slow_upsert      | OFF              |
| tokudb_empty_scan               | rl               |
| tokudb_fs_reserve_percent       | 5                |
| tokudb_fsync_log_period         | 0                |
| tokudb_hide_default_row_format  | ON               |
| tokudb_init_flags               | 11403457         |
| tokudb_killed_time              | 4000             |
| tokudb_last_lock_timeout        |                  |
| tokudb_load_save_space          | ON               |
| tokudb_loader_memory_size       | 100000000        |
| tokudb_lock_timeout             | 4000             |
| tokudb_lock_timeout_debug       | 1                |
| tokudb_log_dir                  |                  |
| tokudb_max_lock_memory          | 65331456         |
| tokudb_pk_insert_mode           | 1                |
| tokudb_prelock_empty            | ON               |
| tokudb_read_block_size          | 65536            |
| tokudb_read_buf_size            | 131072           |
| tokudb_read_status_frequency    | 10000            |
| tokudb_row_format               | tokudb_zlib      |
| tokudb_tmp_dir                  |                  |
| tokudb_version                  | tokudb-7.1.7-rc7 |
| tokudb_write_status_frequency   | 1000             |
+---------------------------------+------------------+
42 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The most important of the tokudb_ variables is arguably tokudb_cache_size. The test server where I ran those tests (test01) have a little less than 1G of memory and as you can see above TokuDB is “reserving” half (50%) of them to itself. That’s the default behavior but, of course, you can change it. And you must do it if you are also going to have InnoDB tables on your server – you should not overcommit memory between InnoDB and TokuDB engines. Shlomi Noach wrote a good post explaining the main TokuDB-specific variables and what they do. It’s definitely a worth read.

I hope you have fun testing Percona Server with TokuDB! If you run into any problems worth reporting, please let us know.

The post Percona Server with TokuDB (beta): Installation, configuration appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.