I’ve presented at two different venues about HandlerSocket recently and the number one question that always arises is:
Considering how fast and awesome HandlerSocket is, it’s not seeing as rapid adoption as some might expect. I theorize that there are five reasons for this:
Up until the beginning of the year, HandlerSocket had a couple of bugs that a lot of people considered deal-breakers, and it’s not widely known that these issues have been fixed.
Lots of organizations simply use what is provided to them. This was the case with MyISAM in standard distributions of MySQL for the longest time; many people were on MyISAM simply because it was the default. Even today, many organizations using recent versions of MySQL 5.1 are not using the InnoDB plugin because it is not enabled by default! If people cannot be bothered to add a couple of lines to my.cnf to enable the InnoDB plugin, they certainly cannot be expected to build the HandlerSocket plugin from source.
This is being changed with Percona-Server. The HandlerSocket plugin is now included by default and it simply takes a couple of steps to set it up. Hopefully we’ll see HandlerSocket be included in other places in the MySQL community.
There are no real releases or release schedules that are easy to digest. There is active development, bugs are being fixed, and the documentation is improving, but that does not translate into people knowing that their bugs are fixed and there is new code available.
This is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem where people need to see use cases or endorsements of well-known companies in order to adopt a technology. Generally speaking, engineers are more inclined to remember a use case for a particular technology when it is well documented.
Finally, the benchmarks are not thorough enough. Nobody has yet taken the time to show diverse workloads on a variety of data sets. The existing work has focused almost entirely on primary-key-select workloads because that is where HandlerSocket truly shines; but people still want to know how the rest of the functionality performs. Also, there is an inherent distrust of benchmarks when done only by parties who have an interest in the product; there needs to be a wide variety of benchmarks from an even wider variety of industries and companies.
Most of these “issues” will work themselves out naturally as HandlerSocket matures. More people will publish benchmarks and use cases. As companies upgrade their Percona-Server installations, HandlerSocket will become available and easily accessible to them. Finally, as the code matures and the community grows, we’ll see lots more third-party involvement with bug reports, feature requests, and patches. I see lots of interest in HandlerSocket and am tremendously optimistic about it’s future.
