Jim Panttaja

Tim O’Reilly wrote today about MySQL: Twelve Days of Scaleout in O’Reilly Radar. For twelve days, MySQL will highlight a different company that is using MySQL to scale-out their business. Today’s highlighted company is Wikipedia.

One of the distinctions that MySQL is making with this series of articles is scale-out vs scale-up. They define scale-out as improving performance and scalability incrementally on commodity hardware. Scale-up is the process of making a large up-front investment in more complex and expensive hardware and database licenses.

The examples are compelling. Wikipedia handles 25,000 requests a second with 20 replicated MySQL servers. They also deploy additional MySQL servers on application servers. With (as an example) Oracle – you wouldn’t even think about deploying the additional servers – because of license costs.

Other highlighted companies include: Zimbra – which supports 8 million paid mailboxes across 10s of thousands of organizations; Alcatel-Lucent who has deployed an application that supports 50 million users generating up to 1000 transaction per second at peak times; Gumtree.com which supports over 1 million ads at a time, and has deployed 10 MySQL servers to support its service.

If you are deploying expensive database products, it is worth reviewing these case studies, looking at the white papers and listening in to the the webinar on June 20th.