MySQL Cluster Makes Performance and Availability Improvements to Meet New Demands

To address the growing requirements posed by the proliferation of digital devices and platforms, and the resulting need for online transaction processing to be as efficient as possible, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4.

With no single point of failure, MySQL Cluster 7.4 provides greater performance, higher availability, and advanced management capabilities to power demanding telecommunications, web, mobile, and cloud services. According to the company, the new release is significant in that not only improves overall performance but also eases the management burden for DBAs and DevOps teams.

Cluster has had “huge success” in the telco and mobile industry, as well as the mobile gaming industry which similarly finds benefit in its capabilities. As a result, many of the requirements driving the product forward are geared to those workload demands, explained Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL engineering, Oracle.  “Scaling on bigger machines, bigger data nodes, being able to manage the high availability capabilities and upgrading the system in a very short time span - those are the key things that we are constantly improving and have improved a lot in this release. It is much faster especially on bigger machines and you can do a rolling upgrade faster.”

The 7.4 release builds upon a series of development milestone releases that have enabled users to preview, test, and provide feedback during the development process.

Major enhancements have been made in four key areas:

1. Greater in-memory performance and scalability, with the new release deliveringa nearly 50% performance improvement over MySQL Cluster 7.3 for read-only workloads and nearly 40% improvement for read/write operations, according to the SysBench benchmark. Performance improvements are available through SQL or any of the native NoSQL APIs supported by MySQL Cluster, including Java, C++, HTTP, Memcached, and JavaScript/Node.js.
2. Improved workload efficiency for analytics, allowing users to efficiently run application workloads involving complex analytics and ad hoc searches on MySQL Cluster using the same memory-optimized tables that provide sub-millisecond low latency and extreme levels of concurrency for OLTP workloads.
3. New geographic redundancy features for high availability across data centers that enable rollback of any conflicting transactions, for full active-active, update-anywhere replication between geographically distant clusters, with applications able to send reads and writes to any site without compromising on consistency.
4. Advanced management capabilities for both on-premises and cloud-based deployments features the following improvements, including new reports on distributed memory use and database operations, enabling more effective management; and additional performance tuning options.

MySQL Cluster 7.4. is available as both an open source and a commercial edition.