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The Biggest MySQL Cluster, Ever?

Posted by Cliff on from the an-RDBMS-that-needs-a-diet dept.

ExcerLee asks: "Our team is going to build a MySQL (load-balancing and fail-over) cluster for the Cluster World Expo in the end of June. This cluster is going to have at least 10 nodes, and will use dual-opteron systems from Polywell Computers and SuSE Enterprise Linux for AMD64 from SuSE. While we are working on this hefty cluster, we wonder if this is the biggest MySQL cluster has ever been built. I googled with terms like 'biggest mysql cluster', but didn't find much." If you've run a MySQL cluster before, how large was it and how well did it perform? Krow: I have been told of much larger clusters then this; Slashdot DBs total 6 machines with 18 processors, and LiveJournal has one of the most complicated clusters I have ever seen set up.

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Why would they think that? by Hanashi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    IT environments are so complex today, why would anyone think only 10 of anything is "the biggest"?

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  2. Documentation by wixu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you planing to write some documentation of this work and showing it to internet?

  3. Since MySQL doesn't actually support 'clustering' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    in any meaningful sense of the word, you could say the biggest MySQL cluster ever built has been... 1 machine.

    You can take a flatfile text database, put it on a bunch of computers,run round-robin DNS, and label it a 'large database cluster' if you want, but I don;t think that is a very useful definition of 'cluster'

    You could periodically run rsync to update the slave node's files from a single master file too, but this is routinely done with things like FTP mirrors of Linux distros. Is rpmfind.net a 'cluster'?

    Now, if MySQL have support for multi-master replication, or have made it possible for multiple processes to simultaneously read/write to the same database, then they might have something.

    Seriously, if you can run multiple MySQL master processes on an OpenMOSIX cluster without worrying about data corruption or lost transactions when a node fails, then you can say you have a cluster.

    If you can use a simple IPVS-based cluster, log a transaction to any node of a cluster, and have that transaction replicate transparently to all other nodes of the cluster, without running the risk of serving 'stale' data from the other nodes, then you can say you have a cluster.

    At this point, I don't think MySQL can do either, and probably won't in the near future.

    I'm all for a truly cluster-enabled databse solution in the OSS space, but MySQL isn't it.