Geo-scale MySQL – or how to build a global, multi-region MySQL cloud back-end capable of serving several hundred million player accounts

This blog introduces a series of blogs we’ll be publishing over the next few months that discuss a number of different customer use cases that our solutions support and that centre around achieving continuous MySQL operations with commercial-grade high availability (HA), geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR) and global scaling.

This first use case looks at a customer of ours who are a global gaming company with several hundred million world-wide player accounts.

What is the challenge?

How to reliably, and fast, cater to hundreds of millions of game players around the world? The challenge here is to serve a game application for a geographically-distributed audience; in other words, a pretty unique challenge.

It requires fast, local response times …

The world's largest producer of casual games has selected MySQL Cluster to power its real-time recommendations platform.

High velocity data ingestion, low latency reads, on-line scaling and the operational simplicity delivered by MySQL Cluster has enabled Big Fish to increase customer engagement and deliver targeted marketing, providing a more personalized experience to its users.

You can read the full Big Fish Games and MySQL Cluster case study here - and a summary below

BUSINESS NEED

The global video gaming market is experiencing explosive growth. Competition is intense, …

Introduction

Attracting over 2m subscribers in just 4 months and growing by 30,000 new users per day, Playful Play needed a database that was able to keep pace with the massive scalability and high availability demands of the wildly successful La Vecindad de El Chavo Facebook game.

Playful Play selected MySQL Cluster CGE running on a public cloud to power their gaming platform, providing:

• 45% improvement in performance;
• 99.999% uptime;
• 80% reduction in DBA overhead;
• Local language support, 24x7.

As a result, Playful Play has been able to maintain user growth rates and attract new advertisers to the platform, while enhancing agility and reducing cost. …

According to VentureBeat*, games companies raised a record-breaking $1.54 billion in funding last year and social gaming accounted for over half of that. No wonder everyone wants to have a piece of that pie!

With the arrival of social network platforms, the gaming industry has seen an explosion in casual and social gaming. The social gamer represents a massive audience that cuts across all age, gender and demographic boundaries. Online social games are some of the most demanding applications in the world, with millions of users, stringent response times, complex simulation models and billing requirements. Games take years to develop for a reason ...

Online social games are data-driven applications, and databases are central to these applications. However, there is no single database architecture that will fit the different types of data that the application needs to store. A data management architecture needs to …