Thoughts on MySQL UC

Ian and I ventured down to MySQL UC with one goal, which was to figure out a way to scale MySQL efficiently. Specifically, I was looking for a way to scale MySQL in a way that didn’t reduce feature sets and was transparent to my application. My second goal was to learn of ways to optimize MySQL and find out about new features of interest.

The answer to my first question simply; you can’t do that. MySQL offers two options for scaling out and high availability. One is replication, which is asynchronous and requires your application to know where to send reads, writes and “critical” reads. In other words, it’s not transparent to the application. The second option is clustering with NDB, which lacks foreign key constraints and comes with the suggestion that you avoid joins and denormalize your schemas to avoid joins. However, there is a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, which is Continuent’s m/cluster solution, which was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortuantely, at $5k per socket per database node, it comes with a hefty price tag. They do have an open source version that only supports ANSI SQL though which I may look into.

One area which Ian and I have learned quite a bit while at MySQL UC is the abundance of new features in 5.0 and 5.1. Triggers, views, stored procedures and events are all finding their way into these versions. Ian and I have already discussed areas that we’ll be using triggers and stored procedures to create aggregate tables for caching purposes. We have a few areas that we’ll be using events in 5.1 as well.

Some other random thoughts …

  1. The lunches weren’t all that great. I wish I could opt out of the lunches, save some cash on that and buy my own.
  2. The weather in Seattle has been better than it has been in Santa Clara, which negates the purpose of having the conference in “sunny” California.
  3. In discussions with fellow attendees it’s become fairly evident that both Ian and myself are pushing the limits of PHP and MySQL far beyond what most people are doing. This makes it difficult to find people to turn to for help.
  4. There are a lot of people wearing SCAMP shirts. I can’t believe those dirty bastards have the guts to show up at a conference such as this.

As a side note to my non-techie friends, this is the last in a long string of wholly geek related entries. So, please, quit sending me email complaining about this.

2 thoughts on “Thoughts on MySQL UC

  1. Pingback: Michael Kimsal’s weblog » MySQL scalability thoughts

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