“The use of Asynchronous I/O via ‘io_uring’ Linux interface should really help improve IO performance, leading to lower latencies. This is a big win for OLTP, where time is everything… We will likely see especially good gains here in environments with network-attached storage,” Lambert said.

Asynchronous IO, according to Percona’s Turner, allows database workers to issue multiple IO instructions without waiting for earlier instructions to complete, and this delivers performance gains by not blocking processing while waiting for subsequent IO operations to start.

However, AIO for now supports disk-heavy reads and not writes, experts pointed out, adding that work is underway on improving bulk writes and checkpoint writes. Examples of write-heavy OLTP workloads are vehicle telemetry, social media, and online gaming platforms.