MySQL Cluster is one of the fastest growing technologies available from MySQL today. To build on this momentum, we are announcing the second Development Milestone Release (DMR) at Oracle Open World 2011. As with all MySQL community releases, the DMR is available under the GPL and can be downloaded from: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/ (select the Development Release tab).
The MySQL Cluster 7.2.1 builds upon the first DMR (7.2.0) announced in April 2011 with a range of new capabilities designed to enable next generation web services, enhance cross data center scalability and simplify provisioning:
* Enabling next generation web services: 70x higher complex query performance, native memcached API and integration with the latest MySQL 5.5 server
* Enhancing cross data scalability: new multi-site clustering and enhanced active/active replication
* Simplified provisioning: consolidated user privileges.
Before exploring each of these new capabilities, it's worth setting the context that is driving new feature development in MySQL Cluster.
It should come as no surprise that data volumes are growing at a much faster rate than anyone previously predicted. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates this growth at 40% per annum1. Increasing internet penetration rates, social networking, high speed wireless broadband connecting smart mobile devices, and increasing Machine to Machine (M2M) interactions are just some technologies fueling this growth. Global eCommerce revenues are expected to reach $1 trillion by 20142. By 2015, global IP networks will deliver 7.3 petabytes of data every 5 minutes - that's the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made crossing the network in just 5 minutes3!
The databases needed to support such a massive growth in data have to meet new challenges, including:
* Scaling write operations, not just reads, across commodity hardware
* Real-time user experience for querying and presenting data
* 24 x 7 availability for continuous service uptime
* Reducing barriers to entry, enabling developers to quickly launch new, innovative services.
Of course you can argue that databases have had these requirements for years - and that is true - but they have never had to address all of these requirements at once, in a single application. For example, some databases have been optimized for low latency and high availability, but then don't have a means to scale write operations and can be very difficult to use. Other databases maybe very simple to start with, but lack capabilities that make them suitable for applications with demanding uptime requirements.
It is also important to recognize that not all data is created equal. It is not catastrophic to lose individual elements of log data or status updates - the value of this data is more in its aggregated analysis. But some data is critical, such as ecommerce transactions, financial trades, customer updates, billing operations, order placement and processing, access and authorization, service entitlements, etc.
And yet, services generating and consuming this data still need the data store to meet the challenges discussed above. It is necessary to protect data integrity with ACID compliance, run complex queries against the data while leveraging the proven benefits of industry standards and skillsets to reduce cost and complexity - all while scaling write operations with high availability and real time responsiveness.
It is these types of workloads that MySQL Cluster is designed for. Examples include:
* High volume OLTP
* Real time analytics
* Ecommerce and financial trading with fraud detection
* Mobile and micro-payments
* Session management && caching
* Feed streaming, analysis and recommendations
* Content management and delivery
* Massively Multiplayer Online Games
* Communications and presence services
* Subscriber / user profile management and entitlements.
MySQL Cluster is a write-scalable, real-time, ACID-compliant transactional database, combining 99.999% availability with the low TCO of open source. Designed around a distributed, multi-master architecture with no single point of failure, MySQL Cluster horizontally scales on commodity hardware with auto-sharding to serve read and write intensive workloads, accessed via SQL and NoSQL interfaces.
The second Development Milestone Release of MySQL Cluster 7.2 brings the benefits of the technology to a new range of web, enterprise and telecom services by delivering the following enhancements.
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