Friday, October 7, 2011

Fusion-io Accelerates MySQL Transactions

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, the developer of solid state data storage devices, said earlier this week that it is targeting the popular open source database MySQL with a new feature. According to the company, it has unveiled a new extension to its VSL software subsystem, which provides atomic writes to MySQL. Atomic writes are a requirement for databases, which ensures that data being written to a database is entered in the proper order. Fusion-io explained that the new feature will help accelerate the MySQL database, by allowing a processor to simultaneously write mulitple independent storage sectors as a single transaction. Usually, a complex number of software locks and checks are made on writes by databases to ensure the proper ordering of writes; the new Fusion-io feature eliminates the need for those locks, which are often the cause of database performance issues.