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The trend for NoSQL stores such as memcache for fast key-value storage should give us pause for thought: what have regular database vendors been doing all this time? An important new project, HandlerSocket, seeks to leverage MySQL’s raw speed for key-value storage.
NoSQL databases offer fast key-value storage for use in backing web applications, but years of work on regular relational databases has hardly ignored performance. The main performance hit with regular databases is in interpreting queries.
HandlerSocket is a MySQL server plugin that interfaces directly with the InnoDB storage engine. Yoshinori Matsunobu, one of HandlerSocket’s creators at Japanese internet and gaming company Dena, reports over 750,000 queries per second performance on commodity server hardware: compared with 420,000 using memcache, and 105,000 using regular SQL access to MySQL. Furthermore, since the underlying InnoDB storage is used, HandlerSocket offers a NoSQL-type interface that doesn’t have to trade away ACID compliance.
With the additional benefits of being able to use the mature MySQL tool ecosystem for monitoring, replication and administration, HandlerSocket presents a compelling case for using a single database system. As the HandlerSocket protocol can be used on the same database and tables used for regular SQL access, the problems of inconsistency and replication created by multiple tiers of databases can be mitigated.
HandlerSocket has now been integrated into Percona’s XtraDB, an enhanced version of the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL. You can also compile and install HandlerSocket yourself alongside MySQL.