The FacebookThe Google , the LinkedIn, and Twitter today announced this WebScaleSQL, a collaborative project where technicians from these companies will begin to work together to solve challenges created in huge databases.
As its name suggests, WebScaleSQL is a custom version of MySQL and is designed for large web projects.
The four companies will work together to create a new MySQL, which will be available to the public as it will be open source. The project will also help MySQL technicians, and as it is open, many others will have the opportunity and resources to follow.
In a blog post, Facebook revealed who will be the technicians involved in WebScaleSQL and so far how they envision the new project:
- An automated framework that will, for each proposed change, run and publish the results of MySQL's built-in test system (mtr).
- A full new suite of stress tests and a prototype automated performance testing system.
- Several changes to the tests already found in MySQL, and to the structure of some existing code, to avoid problems where otherwise, safe code changes had previously caused tests to fail or caused unnecessary conflicts. These changes make it easier to work on the code and helped us get started creating WebScaleSQL.
- Several changes to improve the performance of WebScaleSQL, including buffer pool flushing improvements (links here and here); optimizations to certain types of queries; support for NUMA interleave policy; and more.
- New features that make operating WebScaleSQL at true web scale easier, such as super_read_only, and the ability to specify sub-second client timeouts.
