Quarantine DB Talk 2020: Refactoring Query Processing in MySQL

MySQL is often called the world’s most popular open source DBMS, and it’s certainly one of the most used. MySQL grew up with the open source movement and the public Internet and became a part of the famous LAMP stack. Today, MySQL server are still powering a huge number of web sites.

A lot has changed in MySQL in the 25 years since the initial release, but a lot of the core code has also remained almost unchanged. The query processing pipeline that takes queries through parsing, optimization and execution is a core part of the DBMS. It must be extended every time new syntax, optimizations or execution methods are added, but it is also a part that is very difficult to change without causing side effects that are visible to the users.

How do you refactor and modernize query processing in a DBMS that has millions of users that will get upset if anything breaks? In this talk we’ll look at how query processing in MySQL works and what Oracle has done, and is doing, to modernize the architecture to make it suitable for the next 25 years, without breaking things (too much).

This talk is part of the Quarantine Database Tech Talk Seminar Series.

Bio:
Norvald joined Oracle and MySQL as a software engineer in 2011 and is now the MySQL optimizer team lead, responsible for query optimization and execution. He holds a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he also is an adjunct associate professor teaching DBMS architecture and design.

More Info: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2020/