Oracle Corp. is currently the world’s second-largest software vendor—and it isn’t going to let a little thing like unstructured data stand in its way. With the recent release of its MySQL Fabric technology, which is meant to meet the demands of cloud- and web-based applications, Oracle is positioning itself to dominate the big data landscape.
Most enterprise data is still stored in relational databases written in SQL. To handle diverse data types and increase the flexibility of database structures, database developers are increasingly employing newer, open source DBMSs, especially MySQL (which Oracle maintains) and more recently NoSQL.
MySQL is currently the world’s most popular open source database. An RDBMS-based SQL implementation designed to support web as well as embedded database applications, MySQL drives some of the world’s largest websites including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It has proven to be easy-to-use, reliable and scalable.
Despite the promise it offers for big data and real-time web applications, NoSQL has yet to evolve to deliver enterprise-grade reporting and manageability. MySQL Fabric is designed to solve these problems by delivering the best of NoSQL and SQL/RDBMS.
The new MySQL Fabric open source framework seeks to combine the flexibility of NoSQL with the robust speed of RDBMS. It should also simplify the management and scaling of MySQL databases by making it easy to manage them in groups.
MySQL Fabric offers high availability through failure detection and failover, by automatically promoting a slave database to be the new master if the master database goes down. It also offers enhanced scalability through automated data sharding, a process of separating database tables into multiple sections. Sharding helps you manage MySQL databases that are too large (or frequently accessed) for a single server.
Other key features include:
- Automatic routing of transactions to the current master database, combined with load balancing of queries across slave databases
- Extensions to PHP, Python and Java connectors to route transactions and queries directly to the correct MySQL server, eliminating the latency associated with passing through a proxy
By enabling multiple copies of a MySQL database to work together, MySQL Fabric will make it easier to perform live backups and scale MySQL databases across multiple servers. This, in turn, will make it easier to safely “scale out” MySQL applications in both on-premise and cloud implementations.
The new framework will support the growing use of MySQL for high-traffic, business-critical web applications. MySQL Fabric also positions Oracle strongly against NoSQL databases like MongoDB and MySQL add-on providers like Percona. Prior to the release of MySQL Fabric, DBAs had to write code or buy third-party software to create a MySQL server cluster.
You can download the new framework as part of the MySQL Utilities 1.4.3 package at: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/fabric/
Note that Oracle also offers the MySQL Cluster version of MySQL, which offers some advantages over MySQL Fabric, such as faster failover times and a two-phase commit to ensure that each transaction is fully recognized.
Contact Buda Consulting to talk over how these technologies can help maximize the performance and reliability of your critical, customer-facing applications.
