In my opinion, there’s a lack of respect for databases in the development community.  I will present two data points to prove my point, including a MySQL example.

Data Point One

I first went to grad school at Washington State University in the early 80’s.  When it came time to pick a Master’s Thesis, I was told, and I quote: “Thy shalt not do your Master’s Thesis on database.”  “Database is a dead, full proved, subject.”  Tell that to Oracle.  Funny how I now work for Oracle. And my PhD thesis is in the area of database.

In my previous Openstack post I established the groundwork for my proposed solution to improve the performance of Openstack Swift Database that consists of two parts: MySQL and Database Chunking.

Database Performance with Openstack Improvement: MySQL

For the first part of the solution, I propose replacing SQLite with MySQL as a database engine. As the name implies, SQLite is fine for small databases, but has performance problems with larger Openstack databases. MySQL is perfect for this problem, since a database is represented as a file system directory, and database tables are represented as files.

In my last two posts (Python’s Strengths & Weaknesses) I have been describing the operation of Openstack Swift Storage. Swift storage basically consists of four components: Ring, Database, Zones, and File system. I’m proposing some performance improvements to this design. But first we need to understand the Swift database schema. An Openstack Account Database consists of two tables: Account Stat and Container. And a Container Database consists of two tables: Container Stat and Object.