MySQL does not scale
Well, not very much. I mean, who wants to only scale to hundreds of millions of page views?
Aside from Oracle, that is? ;-)
As Tim notes, MySQL is in the middle of its "12 Days of Scale-out," which is designed to show how MySQL, that little database that could, is delivering monster-sized performance for some of the biggest names on the planet.
Like Wikipedia, for example, which uses MySQL to service:
- More than 154 million annual visitors
- More than 5 million articles
- More than 290,000 contributors
- Nearly half a million edits each day
- 25,000 SQL queries/second
- 20 servers, with MySQL replication used to add more as needed
Not bad. Booking.com, Alcatel-Lucent, and others are also profiled on the site for their use of MySQL.
It's time to put DB2's and Oracle's wishful thinking behind us. The most demanding database applications in the world run open source, much of that being MySQL. The problem has been that we've been looking in the wrong places to chart MySQL's progress. We've been looking at old-school enterprises instead of the far more demanding (and interesting?) applications being driven by the Web 2.0 world, where MySQL reigns supreme.
Disclosure: I have no financial interest in MySQL. I just think it's better. :-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
However as you note, the beauty about mysql is it fits hand in glove with internet companies. Take flickr. Upload a photo, oops, something happens to the transaction, oh well, upload the photo again. Who cares about transactional integrity? It?s not like I just transferred $10,000 from my savings to my chequing account but it didn?t show up in the chequing account. The beauty with mysql is flickr can take it and scale it to the nth degree. You can do this with Oracle RAC too, for oh, about a gazillion jillion licensing dollars and a couple overpaid DBA?s like me.
Oracle will remain the B52 of the databases... massive data processing power and will hit the target everytime... at a cost. mysql is the F16 fighter jet? sleek, fast and you can deploy a squadron of them to do serious damage. Only, unlike the F16, mysql isn?t that expensive.
This Oracle DBA?s next project will be on mysql? watch out Larry, Oracle?s bread and butter is seriously endangered? perhaps that?s why he bought Innobase?? If you can?t beat?m, buy?m?