Learn how Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus edition can accelerate your MySQL workloads

As a fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgresSQL and SQL Server, Cloud SQL lowers the cost of database ownership in several ways: it makes it easy to set up and operate a highly available database as well as scale with replicas, it provides security, it  automates database upgrades and maintenance, and it manages and monitors your database. It’s also easy to migrate to Cloud SQL using Google Cloud’s Database Migration Service. It’s no surprise then, that more than 95% of Google Cloud’s top 100 customers use Cloud SQL.

Google has now launched  Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition for MySQL and PostgreSQL. This new edition has all of the great benefits you get with Enterprise edition, but adds some important capabilities in availability and data protection: a 99.99% availability SLA that is inclusive of maintenance, near-zero-downtime upgrades, and up to 35-day point-in-time recovery capability. 

In addition to all these great new features, Enterprise Plus edition delivers several performance improvements including a data cache feature that allows you to seamlessly scale your workload. In this post we describe the performance results of Cloud SQL Enterprise plus edition on standard database benchmarks to showcase some of the improvements that you can gain when you choose it for your MySQL workloads.

New compute platform and architecture

Enterprise Plus edition gives MySQL users the option to enable a data cache feature, which can dramatically accelerate read performance. The data cache adds local SSD media to the Cloud SQL for MySQL instance, extending the MySQL buffer pool beyond memory to use local SSD. This allows read requests that cannot be serviced from data stored in the instance’s memory to be retrieved from local SSD rather than going out to instance storage, reducing latency and delivering 3x improvement in read throughput for MySQL workloads. The data cache is optional, but when you enable it, an optimal size of local SSD is provisioned on the instance depending upon the number of vCPUs you’ve configured.

Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition database instances leverage a different underlying hardware platform than Enterprise Edition, with a higher memory-to-vCPU ratio of 8 GB per vCPU. Even without any tuning, this platform delivers performance benefits when compared to Enterprise edition: the increased memory allows more data to be resident in memory when processing queries, therefore reducing latency associated with doing disk I/O operations during query processing. Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition also allows instances with up to 128 vCPU to allow your workloads to scale to higher levels.

With Enterprise Plus edition, we also improved Cloud SQL for MySQL’s write performance using several techniques and optimizations to reduce latency, resulting in up to 2X increased write throughput. This is due to a combination of more efficient log writes and a better CPU, resulting in reduced wait time for committing transactions, and increased throughput. This makes Enterprise Plus edition very well suited to applications with high data-ingestion rates. 

Combined with the read-performance improvements, these changes mean that Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition shines on mixed workload performance, as shown in the benchmark results below.

The blue bars represent the results when running on CloudSQL Enterprise Edition and the green bars are the results when running with Enterprise Plus with data cache enabled. Mixed workloads on Enterprise Plus edition show up to 171% improvement when compared to Enterprise edition.

Read-only workloads show an even more dramatic improvement when leveraging Enterprise Plus with data cache. The results of a read-only benchmark above show a 241% increase in queries per second (QPS) on a 32 vCPU instance and a 218% increase on a 64 vCPU instance. 

Go ahead, scale those MySQL applications

With the introduction of Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus edition, you now have a great new option for scaling your applications. In this post, we covered the performance benefits using standard database benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition offers significant performance improvements when compared to Enterprise edition, and also beats other major public cloud vendors’ comparative services’ MySQL performance. As a result, you can expect significant value in terms of price/performance when running your MySQL database applications with Google Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus edition. 

Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition is now available in select Google Cloud regions.  To get started, provision an Enterprise Plus edition instance from the Google Cloud console or GCloud API.