Raj Cherabuddi — Faster, Greener, Cheaper (Why every MySQL server will one day have a SQL chip) @ UC

Disclaimer: I have talked to Kickfire extensively before the conference. I have blogged several times and written and article for MySQL Magazine about this.  I have not received any payment from Kickfire.

C2 (now Kickfire) approached MySQL about a year and a half ago with the idea of building a chip that would run SQL in hardware. Since this time they have developed what amounts to an “appliance” that is now the number one ranked server on the TPC-H benchmarks in price/performance and also number one in performance in non-clustered environment.

Kickfire is looking to reduce two bottlenecks of a data warehousing system - the I/O bottleneck and the CPU bottleneck.

Raj didn’t talk about the CPU bottleneck much. However, some of their techniques bypass caches to improve performance.  Also, the SQL Chip is going to offload much of the load from the CPU because it does in the SQL Chip what was being done in the internal CPU.

I/O bottleneck resolution approaches:

• Column store format and compression of data (including on the fly reading of compressed data)
• intelligent indexing
• smart pre-fetching

In addition they developed the aforementioned SQL chip. The benefits of this:

• execution in hardware of SQL commands
• parallel query execution

Raj then went through some of the benchmarks. I released these numbers in the magazine article. It is available at http://mysqlzine.net (spring 2008 issue).

I think that there was a lot of wondering (as in “is this real?”) before the conference.  I think a number of questions have been answered.  It will be interesting to see what comes out of all this!