Even though the PostgreSQL server is often considered to be the fastest RDBMS in the world after Oracle Database, the MariaDB (fork of MySQL) server remains one of the fastest and most popular RDBMSs, especially when it comes to simple SQL queries. Thus, when discussing SQL optimizations in this book, we will mostly use MariaDB.
To benchmark our MariaDB server, we will be using the mysqlslap utility included with MySQL servers since version 5.1.4. In order to run the tests, we will start by loading the Sakila test database. On the container's command line, enter the following commands:
# wget -O sakila-db.tar.gz \ > https://downloads.mysql.com/docs/sakila-db.tar.gz # tar -xzvf sakila-db.tar.gz # mysql -uroot < sakila-db/sakila-schema.sql ...
