SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Theres a Swedish word, “lagom.” It means not too little, not too much, and its what MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos wants database users to think about when scaling out, he said in his keynote address here Wednesday during the MySQL Users Conference.
“Traditionally, its never lagom,” Mickos said. “Either you have too much pain, or too much pay. You have too much infrastructure or not enough. Scale up equals pay up.”
Scaling up with the companys open-source database cuts the pay-up part, Mickos said, enabling companies to respond faster to business loads they cant predict in advance. As Oracle Corp. has been pushing its Database 10g, MySQL is behind the same idea of putting multiple database instances on commodity hardware and scaling up as you go.
Toward that end, Red Hat Inc. and MySQL on Wednesday announced an expanded relationship on a number of joint initiatives, including plans for the two to test the MySQL database on Red Hats Cluster Suite and GFS (Global File System). GFS allows a cluster of MySQL servers to simultaneously read and write data to a single, shared file system on a SAN (storage area network).
The push to scale out reflects the migration to SOA (service-oriented architecture), Mickos said. “Initially, we were looking for automation of transactions. In the 60s and 70s, thats all you did with computers. Then we got into the client-server era, and you went for operational efficiency: the ERPs [enterprise resource planning], the CRMs [customer relationship management], the other heavy enterprise software packages.
“Then people started looking at service-oriented architecture. This will allow enterprises to go to organizational agility and alignment. We need to respond quickly to new market demands. If suddenly we get more traffic, more load, we need to respond quickly to that need. Its open source that will help get there, due to its transparency and modularity. Thats why everybodys interested in using open source for very serious business applications.”
A year after the Uppsala, Sweden, company released its MySQL Cluster software, the company has some big names to flaunt as its users. Cox Communications Inc. is one, with 10 million users of its cable modems; 14 regional centers running MySQL Cluster; 35 MySQL databases running on MyISAM, which is the open-source databases storage engine; and all of it handling some 9,000 inserts per second.
Beyond the clustering partnership, Red Hat and MySQL also offer joint technical support to customers using MySQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The two companies employ TSANet, a collaborative support network, in that endeavor.
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