MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition

MySQL Cluster is a technology providing clustering and auto-sharding for the MySQL database management system.

MySQL Cluster is implemented through the NDB or NDBCLUSTER storage engine for MySQL. Provides:

• Synchronous replication

• Very good small transactions ratio

• Very good high concurrency (many client threads)

• Huge transaction capacity, more than 1M trx/s are not uncommon

• Failover can be ~1s

• No single point of failure

• Geographical disaster recovery capacity built-in

• Strong at async replication, applying by batches gives multithreaded apply at the data node level

• Can scale reads and writes, the framework implements sharding by hashes

Limitations

• Not a drop-in replacement for Innodb, you need to tune the schema and the queries

• Only for specific types of application (not a general purpose database, reporting

• Only the Read-commited isolation level is available

• Hardware heavy, need 4 servers mininum for full HA

• Indexes must be kept in memory, even with disk-based tables

• Complex to operate, lots of parameters to adjust

• Need a load balancer for failover

• Very new foreign key support, field reports scarce on it

Bibliography