Just a quick post, came across this on the MySQL Performance blog and thought it was a really well written paper. Talks about vertical scaling in the most current versions of MySQL, what the major bottlenecks are when scaling with more CPU cores, and how to extract the highest amount of I/O out of today’s modern server hardware.
What I’d like to see just for comparison purposes is running the latest & greatest MySQL, vertically scale it to 48 cores, and compare it against Oracle Standard Edition on the same 48 cores. As far as I know the Oracle license agreement forbid publishing performance numbers so I’ll probably never see this but it is a curiosity of mine, because sharding a database can make application development significantly more complex.
It is nice though that the latest versions of MySQL can scale beyond four cores.