🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, grab your free vendor t-shirts, folks, because I’ve just finished reading another blog post that’s going to make my on-call rotation so much more exciting. "MariaDB 12.3... reduces the number of fsync calls from 2 to 1." Wow. Groundbreaking. You solved a problem by... just putting the problem inside another problem. It's like my car is making two weird noises, so I fix it by welding the hood shut. Now there's only one, much more ominous noise. Innovation.

The whole premise here is a masterpiece of self-congratulation. "The performance benefit from this is excellent when storage has a high fsync latency." Let me translate that from Lab Coat to English: "If you're running your production database on a potato you bought on clearance, you're going to love this." My man, if your primary performance bottleneck is high fsync latency, you don't need a new binlog engine, you need to call your storage vendor and ask them why they sold you a platter of spinning rust from 2003. This isn't a best-case comparison; it's a cry for help.

And the honesty is just... chef's kiss. "My mental performance model needs to be improved... the improvement is larger than 4X." You don't say. You thought doubling your efficiency would give you a ~2X speedup, but it gave you 4X? That's not a sign of a revolutionary feature. That's a sign that your initial setup was so fundamentally broken that any change looks like a miracle. That's like saying, "I guessed that taking the parking brake off would make my car a little faster, but wow, it's a lot faster! My model needs to be improved!"

I see we’re benchmarking this revolution on an "ASUS ExpertCenter PN53." An ExpertCenter? Is that from the Best Buy "Pro-gamer" collection? You're testing a core database function on something I'm pretty sure my nephew uses to play Fortnite, with one whole NVMe drive. No RAID, no SAN, no enterprise-grade anything. And the benchmark? Oh, this is the best part.

The benchmark is run with 1 client, 1 table and 50M rows.

One client. One. Let that sink in. You’ve successfully simulated the exact workload of a high school student's first PHP project. Meanwhile, I'm over here dealing with 10,000 concurrent connections from a fleet of microservices all trying to update the same six rows during a flash sale. But sure, your 4X improvement with a single, polite client is definitely applicable. Definitely.

But let's skip the fantasy numbers and get to the part I live and breathe: the 3 AM holiday weekend reality. The part where the blog post ends and my nightmare begins. You've now taken the binlog—the sacred, immutable record of every change, the one thing that can save my entire career when things go sideways—and you’ve jammed it into InnoDB. You’ve put your only disaster recovery mechanism inside the very thing it’s supposed to be recovering. It’s like storing your building's fire extinguisher inside the furnace.

What happens when InnoDB gets wedged? Not a full crash, just one of those fun, high-concurrency lockups where it stops responding but doesn't technically die. Before, I could at least look at the binlog on disk to see the last committed transaction. Now? The binlog is locked up inside the engine that's... well, locked up. My replicas are blind. My failover scripts are useless. My monitoring tools? Ha. You think anyone wrote a new check for "is the binlog, which is now an internal InnoDB table, accessible?" Of course not. The dashboard will be all green. It’ll just say QPS is zero. Everything is fine.

I can already picture the incident call. I'll be trying to explain to a VP why our entire database fleet is down because a performance optimization created a single, catastrophic point of failure. I'll be digging through iostat and vmstat logs like some kind of digital archeologist, because of course nobody thought to expose internal metrics for this new franken-log.

I've got a special drawer in my desk. It's full of stickers from defunct startups and "revolutionary" database technologies. TokuDB, Clustrix, RethinkDB... they're all in there. They all had a blog post just like this one, with big, impressive numbers from a benchmark that had nothing to do with reality.

So go ahead, enable binlog_storage_engine. I've already got a spot cleared in the drawer for MariaDB's sticker. It'll fit right next to the one that says "Web Scale."

But hey, great work. You made a number go up in a spreadsheet. That’s what really matters. I’m sure it’ll look great on a slide.