A while ago, I had a discussion with Stewart Smith, Vinay Joosery, Monty Taylor and a number of other MySQLers who know much more about MySQL Cluster than I do. The result is a model for using MySQL Proxy to offload MySQL Cluster from doing Table Scans, without touching the application.
The discussion started from me asking Stewart about the largest road block for expanding the number of use cases for MySQL Cluster. “Oh, that would probably be doing JOINs and other SELECTs requiring the scanning of large parts of the database”, he replied. “There, other storage engines are faster, such as MyISAM and InnoDB.”
In a very simple view, the application talks SQL with MySQL Cluster, and gets responses.
Stewart’s insight can be refined into the first simplistic diagram by adding the recognition that “SQL” can consist of
- UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE statements (very light, usually …