Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

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.