I read a post on blogs.zdnet.com about MySQL that I think was interesting. In the post, Dana Blankenhorn is posing that MySQL is “enterprise class” using the Booking.com deployment as case-in-point.
What is “Enterprise Class?”
The post got me thinking. What is “Enterprise Class” anyway? Is it any software used in any enterprise datacenter? I tend to think of an enterprise class database server as one that can vertically scale to exploit the largest servers in support of a single, large application. Using those criteria leaves MySQL out I should think. Or am I behind the times on that? Are there any single MySQL databases running on a 64CPU Superdome for instance? It appears as though MySQL is supported on Itanium HP-UX for 2-processor systems.
Enterprise MySQL
In this computerworlduk.com article, it looks as though Booking.com uses something like 20 MySQL database servers to handle “tens of thousands” of bookings for 30,000 hotels spanning some 8,000 destinations. Let’s say for the sake of argument that it is 20 database servers and “tens of thousands” is 100,000. I admit I don’t know anything about the richness of this application, but I don’t see anything too brutal here. These sorts of applications lend themselves to partitioning naturally. It wouldn’t surprise any of us Oracle types to find out that they partition based upon hotel. That seems like a natural line to partition on. If that is the case, I get 1,500 hotels per database server handling their fair share of about 1.2 transactions per second (100,000/86,400 seconds in a day). I know these things are not that simple, but folks, we are talking about 20 database servers. Even if they are 2-socket/dual core systems you’ve got some 80 cores to work with! At first glance it just doesn’t seem as though these systems would be working that hard. And MySQL? Well, it doesn’t have to work that hard at all since the workload is partitionable. Who knows, maybe all workloads are partitionable and we Oracle-types are just missing the ball. Anyway, I can’t seem to find what storage engine is being used at Booking.com. And speaking of MySQL storage engines…
A 3-legged Pink Elephant
If you’re interested in 3-legged pink elephants, I’ve got one for you since we are on the topic of MySQL. In computerworlduk.com article we find that MySQL announced support for MySQL on IBM System I (yes, OS-400) with DB2 as the storage engine. Wow, that would be weird. Or it seems so at least.
What’s this Really Have to do with Oracle?
Oracle Database can do everything MySQL can do. The opposite is not true. ‘Nuff said. Oh, did I mention that Oracle Corporation is not a “Database Company” anymore. They’ve got the database now they are getting everything else.
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Heck… I just did 25 TPS in a virtual machine on my laptop with Oracle running swingbench. I guess booking.com could deploy their app on a macbook pro. Laptops are great for enterprise servers… built in battery backup 🙂
Glenn,
Thanks for that…I’ll have to get a little of that humor this week over Martini’s if we can swing it!
Well, I pretty much agree that those show off business cases are all crap and what’s shown there doesn’t match the real life so whoever says tens of thousands or zillions transaction per defined or undefined period of time is lying anyway.
On one conference I read one sponsor’s brochure and everything written there was complete lie – laterally, not a single sentence was true except that company X bought product Y. On another conference proceedings included another show case but it was 100% true even though it was a bit exaggerated. In both cases I know the companies very well so you never know.
Where was I? Right… Any product can be of “enterprise” class if it can be *effectively* managed in *high scale* environment.
One 64 CPU HP Superdome running Oracle and 32 x 2 cores “mini-blades” running MySQL farm – both can be enterprise class systems if managed appropriately.
You see Glenn, Apples have ZFS now: you should be doing 50TPS at least!
(and I’m father chrissie…)
Alex: know what you mean, budddy.
But wait until you meet the development team from hell: 7 years to develop a legal support system at Attorney General’s in Sydney, not a single production screen anywhere, lots of promises on how this time they’ll deliver, etcetc.
But heck: it’s being handled by “senior architects”, “senior project managers”, “senior dbas” and a small army of j2ee developers, all supported by Oracle and some third party service company.
To give you a small example of the insanity of the design, the entire database is loaded into memory so that “joins can be done quickly inside Java”! Wait until they hear of Fusion, there will be another 15 years at least of milking the cow right there!
It’s the worst case of wasted public money I’ve ever seen in Australia. So it MUST be the right way to do things.
All this to say: it’s got indeed nothing to do with the product. Nor the management. It’s got all to do with who supports this crap and promotes what amounts to complete, sheer incompetence…
Noons, sounds like someone has way to much money. I guess they will need to raise the taxes a bit so be ready. 😉
But honestly, I think they don’t really need that system then!
Btw, regarding this all memory cache and etc. I saw recently interesting acquisition by Oracle – http://www.pythian.com/blogs/503/oracle-coherence-rac-mysql
Should it be conFusion Light? 😉
Purrrfect!
If the j2ee morons at AGD catch a whiff of this “coerence” rubbish,
they’ll have the perfect excuse to “refactor” all the nonsense of the last 7
years into it. That should be a good excuse for another 5 years at least
of delivering absolutely nothing: as in: zilch, nada!
I must have been imagining things when we delivered three complete
applications in Forms 10 to Mining&Resources in 2005 with over 150
screens and as many reports, completely designed, converted and
developed by three – that’s 3! – folks in 10 months.
But of course: that was a “mickey-mouse” application that is not
representative of “serious modern” database development technology.
Its database is only 100 times larger than AGD’s, after all!
But the clown show must go on…