Revitalizing MySQL – Tokutek Open Sources TokuDB High Performance Engine

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Many companies, startups and regular enterprises, have relied on MySQL over the years as a low cost (open source or supported versions) yet highly reliable relational database. Yet in these days of growing data sets, many development projects now start with NoSQL (or newSQL) variants in mind. These alternative databases tend to trade-off ACID transactions and SQL “join” query ability in exchange for greater performance and availability at scales where traditional SQL db engines bog down or collapse. Unfortunately, there are a lot of experienced devs/DBAs and existing apps based and built on MySQL and it’s not so easy to rip and replace.

Tokutek is one of the companies with technology that accelerates and extends MySQL by replacing its default “engine” with a supercharged version. But to implement TokuDB til now, you might have also had to compare the cost of implementing their special proprietary engine with paying up for Oracle or DB2 or migrating to something less SQL-ish.

But now Tokutek has just done something quietly significant that could impact anyone with a MySQL app – they’ve gone and open sourced the latest version TokuDB v7 for MySQL (and MariaDB).  Anybody can now take advantage of their “fractal-tree” indexing that enables MySQL to scale to TB’s (instead of maybe 500GB) of data with 10x index and insertion performance (and lots of other benefits). It just drops into MySQL as a transparent replacement for the default InnoDB engine. 

…(read the full post)