May 16, 2012

MySQL Cluster 7.2 -- Unlimited Possibilities

We've recently seen some great announcements of MySQL Cluster delivering amazing results for both selects and updates. The posts (see related articles below) are full of juicy technical details and proofs, but today I'd like to change the perspective a bit. Let's compare those figures with real-world data and imagine what could be done. Please note that I'm not using any scientific method here, just dreaming about the unlimited opportunities offered by MySQL Cluster today.

MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 -- 1B+ Writes per Minute
Cluster can deliver 1B+ selects per minute with 8 nodes and 1B+ updates per minute with 30 nodes.

Our planet is getting quite populated and interconnected. World population is 7B+ and 2B+ of us are using internet. Let's assume that, due to time-zones, only 1/3 of the total internet population is online at a given time (700M+) and that a single action generates one update and one select on the database.

What kind of services can we offer then?

With such scalability and performance, MySQL Cluster offers endless opportunities to develop something new that can support the exponential growth of the web and offer always-on services to everyone, for example:
  • Hellos from the world -- a website where everyone can say hello to the world, whenever they want. MySQL Cluster can handle the entire online population in less than 1 minute;
  • Let's shop together -- a global eCommerce website selling everything with 100% market share. If everyone would buy an item per minute, MySQL Cluster could easily fulfill the needs of the entire internet population with 30 nodes;
  • Like everything you like -- a like button that can be attached to everything in order to collect statistics on users' favorite things. MySQL Cluster could easily sustain the total online world assuming they'd like 1 thing per minute;
Furthermore, MySQL Cluster could handle updates from all of Zynga's 60M active daily users in 3 seconds or all of Facebook's 900M+ active users in less than a minute. All of that giving you ACID compliance and synchronous replication to ensure no data loss.

The Oracle MySQL engineering team did a great job with Cluster: let's build the next big thing with it!

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