ScaleBase is happy to sponsor the Percona Live London MySQL Conference. If you plan to attend, you can catch our booth on the expo floor or attend Liran’s session – “The Benefits of Database Sharding” at 2PM, October 25th at the Bishopsgate Suite.

In the previous post of this series (which can be found here) I discussed how to identify tables that can serve as good candidates for sharding.

Once you have decided which tables should be sharded (all the rest should be global tables), the choice of sharding keys is rather straightforward, as most will use the table primary key as the shard key. Of course, if multiple tables are sharded, and there is a foreign key relationship between these tables, then the foreign key will serve as the shard key for some tables.

Many people attempt to shard based on customer_id or a resource id, but I have seen how this usually fails in production environments. It is very hard to know in advance which customers belong together in the same database, and since customers can suddenly increase their traffic, this might create an unbalanced situation in which some …

Yeah, we know it’s 6 month from now – but we’ll give a lecture titled “Database Sharding on MySQL” at the Boston MySQL Meetup. Register here.

You might remember that MySQL was aquired by Sun, which later went into Oracle (who won’t? ). As usual in such a process network infrastructure is being merged to ease managing it. Such a merge is currently in process with the effect that previously publicly available servers are now behind Oracle’s firewalls. From a security point of view this is good news, not so for services that relied on this access. One of them is our copy of all old GUI tools repositories on Launchpad. These repositories have been made available 3 years ago when we prepared the switch to MySQL Workbench as our main product. The idea behind it was that anybody who is interested can work on the code and propose patches.

As you can see there this hasn’t worked out well. No merges were proposed during all the time, so we are going to use this interruption of the Launchpad mirroring to stop this …

It has been quite a while since the last release, but we’ve been quite busy. One of the reasons was that we were required to make a relatively major core change in the Workbench codebase, which unfortunately did not add anything new from a user’s point of view. There’s potential for new bugs having been introduced by that, and while the program has been undergoing testing for a while, it’s possible there are more bugs in the hiding.

Because of that, we are releasing test binaries for trial by the community. If no regressions are found, this will be the the next version to be released and the foundation for what will be the next major release, which will contain exciting changes that we know many people have been expecting since some time.

Additionally, 44 bugs have been fixed so far in this release.

If you find a bug, please …

Wow. Our launch was picked up by many news sites. Here’s just a partial list. Thanks guys.

• BusinessWire
• CWCS
• Diversity
• DowJones (Subscription required)
• DZone
• …

Boston, Mass., August 15, 2011 – ScaleBase, Inc. today announced the general availability of ScaleBase 1.0 for unlimited scalability of MySQL databases. ScaleBase 1.0 delivers MySQL performance and high availability, without the need to change a single line of application code. Users of MySQL can download and easily deploy the software by visiting http://www.scalebase.com/solution/download/.

ScaleBase utilizes two techniques for scaling: read-write splitting and transparent sharding (a technique for massively scaling-out relational database). The software enables MySQL to scale transparently, without forcing developers to change a …