It's the end of the year and, before the world ends ;-) , I feel the pressure to follow up on last year's article "2011, a great year for MySQL in Review". I'll adopt a similar format and mention things in context, covering products, marketing, momentum, etc. at a high level. I may have missed something and I hope my colleagues will contribute to the list.

I really do think it's been the best year for MySQL so far... well, at least since when I signed my contract with MySQL AB at the end of 2007. We're just at the beginning of our journey and I wish to the MySQL family, to our community and ecosystem an even better 2013!

Summary
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With data volumes exploding, it is vital to be able to ingest and query data at high speed. For this reason, MySQL has implemented NoSQL interfaces directly to the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engines, which bypass the SQL layer completely. Without SQL parsing and optimization, Key-Value data can be written directly to MySQL tables up to 9x faster, while maintaining ACID guarantees.

In addition, users can continue to run complex queries with SQL across the same data set, providing real-time analytics to the business or anonymizing sensitive data before loading to big data platforms such as Hadoop, while still maintaining all of the advantages of their existing relational database infrastructure.

This and more is discussed in the latest Guide to MySQL and …

“Some people even think that “Hadoop” and “Big Data” are synonymous (though this is an over-characterization). Unfortunately, Hadoop was designed based on a paper by Google in 2004 which was focused on use cases involving unstructured data (e.g. extracting words and phrases from Webpages in order to create Google’s Web index). Since it was not [...]

Apart from my consulting as part of ScaleIn, I also invest to bootstrap companies with really disruptive ideas; and in the process met few database specific companies who are already[...]

Here is the typical “Big” data architecture, that covers most components involved in the data pipeline. More or less, we have the same architecture in production in number of places[...]

“Big Data” offers the potential for organizations to revolutionize their operations. With the volume of business data doubling every 1.2 years, analysts and business users are discovering very real benefits when integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources, enabling deeper insight into their customers, partners, and business processes.

As the world’s most popular open source database, and the most deployed database in the web and cloud, MySQL is a key component of many big data platforms, with Hadoop vendors estimating 80% of deployments are integrated with MySQL.

The new Guide to MySQL and Hadoop presents the tools enabling integration between the two data platforms, supporting the data lifecycle from acquisition and organisation to …

Twitter VP of Infrastructure Operations Engineering Mazen Rawashdeh shared news and numbers yesterday on his blog:

"Last night, the world tuned in to Twitter to share the election results as U.S. voters chose a president and settled many other campaigns. Throughout the day, people sent more than 31 million election-related Tweets (which contained certain key terms and relevant hashtags). And as results rolled in, we tracked the surge in election-related Tweets at 327,452 Tweets per minute (TPM). These numbers reflect the largest election-related Twitter conversation during our 6 years of existence, though they don’t capture the total volume of all Tweets yesterday."

"Last night, Twitter averaged about 9,965 TPS from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT, with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak of 874,560 TPM. …

The on-demand webinar for the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Release is now available.

You can learn more about the design, implementation and getting started with all of the new MySQL Cluster 7.3 features from the comfort and convenience of your own device, including:

- Foreign Key constraints in MySQL Cluster

- Node.js NoSQL API 

- Auto-installation of higher performance distributed, clusters

We received some great questions over the course of the webinar, and I wanted to share …

Two cons against NoSQL data stores read like this: 1. It’s very hard to move data out from one NoSQL to some other system, even other NoSQL. There is a very hard lock in when it comes to NoSQL. If you ever have to move to another database, you have basically to re-implement a lot [...]

“For analytical things, eventual consistency is ok (as long as you can know after you have run them if they were consistent or not). For real world involving money or resources it’s not necessarily the case.” — Michael “Monty” Widenius. In a recent interview, I asked Justin Sheehy, Chief Technology Officer at Basho Technologies, maker [...]