Hypertable 0.9 alpha is out.

“Hypertable is a high performance distributed data storage system designed to support applications requiring maximum performance, scalability, and reliability. Hypertable will be particularly invaluable to any organization that needs to manage rapidly evolving data to support demanding real-time applications. Modeled after Google’s well known Bigtable project, Hypertable is designed to manage the storage and processing of information on a large cluster of commodity servers, providing resilience to machine and component failures. Hypertable seeks to set the open source standard for highly available, petabyte scale, database systems. ” (link)

Update: LinuxWorld has an article, Zvents releases open-source cluster database, on the release along with a podcast with Doug Judd, principal search architect for Zvents.

Like most research labs, we rely on MySQL whenever we need a database. And like most (I’m guessing, here), it’s common to overhear something like the following in our lab — “We really need to replace MySQL with Oracle or DB2 in X so it can handle the load.” But we never get around to it.

Maybe we don’t have to. Check out Scaling MySQL at YouTube, a keynote talk by YouTube DBA Paul Tuckfield at the 2007 MySQL Conference put online by Conversationnetwork.org.

“In mid 2006, YouTube served approximately 100 million videos in a single day. To maintain a website of that scale, one would imagine YouTube has hundreds of DBAs. But in fact, there are just three people that make it all work. Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at YouTube shares horror stories about scalability at YouTube and how he coped with them to keep the show going everyday, while learning important lessons along the way. … According to him, the three important reasons for YouTube’s scalability are Python, Memcache and MySQL replication, the last having the most impact. Most people think that the answer to scalability is in upgrading hardware and CPU power. Adding CPUs doesn’t work on its own; wisdom is in getting the maximum amount of RAM for the CPU and then fine tuning.” (src)