Recently some customers running on Amazon EC2 asked me how to configure a HA environment for their ScaleBase instance.
For instance, let’s look at the following architecture:

To ensure that Scalebase is not a single point of failure, several ScaleBase instances can be used – so if one crashes, other instances can handle its connections.

This is quite simple to do:

1. Start the EC2 instance to be used for the ScaleBase configuration
   1. Install MySQL on the machine and follow the database preparation instructions defined in the ScaleBase installation guide.
   2. Install ScaleBase with the –mode=ALL parameter.
   3. Create an EC2 instance that will be used as an AMI for all ScaleBase installations.
      1. Download and install ScaleBase …

There is a huge amount of buzz around NOSQL, and we at ScaleBase are happy to see companies making the move to NOSQL. Despite what some people might think, we consider it a blessed change. It is time for applications to stop having a single data store – namely a relational database (probably Oracle) – and start using the best tool for the job.

In the last couple of years, since NOSQL technologies broke into our world, a lot of experience has been gathered on how to use them. Mainly, we see NoSQL technologies used for one of the following scenarios:

• Queries that require a very short response time
• Storing data without a well-defined schema, or storing data with a frequently modified schema

Now, I’m not in any way saying that NOSQL solutions are not used for other scenarios as well; I’m only saying that from our experience here at ScaleBase ,  these are the most common scenarios.

ScaleBase Releases Database DBT2 Performance Results

Technology achieves unprecedented transaction speed for a MySQL database at a low cost

Boston, Mass., December 12, 2011 – ScaleBase, Inc. today announced the results of its MySQL database benchmark, based on the industry-standard DBT-2 test. ScaleBase has achieved an unmatched 180,000 Transactions per Minute – the highest result for a MySQL database – while running on an Amazon RDS environment. Cost per Transaction was reported to be 50 cents, which demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of the ScaleBase solution on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Full details of the benchmark can be found at …

There are several ways to implement sharding in your application. The first and by far the most popular, is to implement it inside your application. It can be implemented as part of your own Data Access Layer, database driver, or an ORM extension. However, there are many limitations with such implementation, which drove us, at ScaleBase, to look for an alternative architecture.

As the above diagram shows, ScaleBase is implemented as a standalone proxy. There are several benefits to using such an architecture.

First and foremost, since the sharding logic is not embedded inside the application, third party applications can be used, be it MySQL Workbench, MySQL command line interface or any other third party product. This translates to a huge saving in the day-to-day costs of both developers and system administrators.

Backup can be executed via the proxy, and so allows users to consistently backup a sharded environment – not …

The ScaleBase Analysis tool gives a schema a grade between 1 and 100 for being “sharding compatible”. It’s a neat feature, but many ask me how the grade is calculated. Well – here goes.

First of all, a good schema is one that is easy to shard. Database Normalization is usually a good thing when sharding. It means that finding the sharding key is easy, relationships between tables are clear, and the queries themselves are usually much simpler. So we try to give a grade on how well the schema is normalized.

After the sharding configuration is determined (see here on how this should be done), we review your MySQL General Log, to understand the value you can expect from the sharding configuration:

• Statements that run on sharded tables, and hit a …

We at ScaleBase talk about sharding so much, it’s difficult for us to see why someone wouldn’t want to shard. But just because we’re so enthusiastic about our transparent sharding mechanism, it doesn’t mean we can’t understand the very basic question, “When do I shard?”
Well, it’s not the most difficult question to answer. I’ll keep it short: if your database exceeds the memory you have on a single machine, you should shard. If you hit I/O, your performance suffers, and sharding will assist.
Why? That’s easy to explain.
Databases in general (and MySQL is no exception) try to cache data. Because accessing memory is so much faster than accessing disk (even with SSDs), database providers have developed rather sophisticated caching algorithms. For instance, running a query caches the query and its results. Indexes are stored in memory so that, when running a query, the database doesn’t have to hit the disk …

This is the third blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL. You can read the previous post here.

I went over some of the difficult topics you’ll face when migrating from Oracle to MySQL. However, I left out the topic of database scalability (after all – this is a ScaleBase blog).

Oracle users are used to having a very clear scalability path. You start with an Oracle Standard edition, and if your budget allows, you increase hardware (memory, CPU), improve your storage speed, buy Oracle Enterprise edition and use portioning. If all that fails, you move to a distributed RAC environment. If you’re really on the high end, you buy ExaData2. This is where your journey ends. There is nothing “better”.

That’s great for enterprise …

This is the second blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL.

In the first post of the series I tried to explain why you would like your web platform to run on a MySQL database, and not on an Oracle database. In this post, I’ll try to focus on the changes that you need to plan for when migrating from an Oracle environment.

Code

Probably the most obvious change is in code. There is no way around it – you’ll have to change your code.

1. SQL statements.
   While ANSI SQL 92 is a standard, Oracle offers extensions to the spec – and those are used by most developers, sometimes without their being aware of it.
   Of course, when moving to MySQL, those SQL statements will need to change. Some will require only minor …

This is the first blog post in a series designed to assist companies who wish to migrate their code from Oracle to MySQL.

During the World War II “Battle of the Bulge”, General McAuliffe said to the German forces who asked for his surrender: “Nuts!” The rest is history – he won the battle, and the allied forces won the war.

Some things are like that. So absurd that “Nuts” is the only possible reaction. And frankly – running your web infrastructure on an Oracle database is one of those things.

Now, the pricing issue is very well covered. Just see here. And for most people, this should be enough. We had a customer migrating from a 7M USD environment to a 200K yearly environment (licensing and support) – definitely worth the migration hassle!

But it’s not …

In the previous post of this series (which can be found here) I discussed how to migrate your data once you have decided how to shard your schema.

Once your data is sharded, it’s time to modify your application code. I will not dive into the many open source platforms that provide partial sharding support (Hibernate Shards, Gizzard, and the like), and will take Java (sorry, old habits are hard to overcome) as an example – however, the same holds true for any programming language.

Without Using ORM

If you wrote your code without an Object/Relational Mapping tool, kudos to you. Sharding will be easier, as you control the SQL statements.

Upgrading Connection Pool

Your first task is to write a connection pool that is “sharding” aware.  The class should look something like this:
…