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Using dbShards and Cloud SQL to provide MySQL Scalability and Reliability
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO at CodeFutures. CodeFutures is the maker of dbShards Technology, a proven suite of components and tools for working with relational database management systems. dbShards database clusters have been in production for over 3 years in demanding applications supporting multi-terabyte databases with high read and write loads.
Based on our extensive expertise in the database scalability, we were intrigued to work with Google Cloud SQL because if its reliability features. For example, every byte written to Cloud SQL is stored multiple times in multiple locations, so the data is safe and available even in the case of multiple outages, an unmatched capability with Database as a Service vendors.
We initially tested with our dbShards/Migrate tools, allowing customers to seamlessly move their databases from any location — a traditional data center or another cloud vendor — to Google Cloud SQL. The product is based on dbShards patented replication technology, called Continuous Replication, that allows customers to replicate their data from outside the DBMS engine. This results in a no-risk experience without downtime. dbShards/Migrate can also be used to maintain a disaster recovery site for their database, in a remote cloud region, or even hosted by a totally different cloud vendor.
The key to dbShards/Migrate is its ability to continuously and reliably replicate transactions from one database or cluster to another in a remote location over the internet as a wide area network. Because the product replicates transactions outside the DBMS, it is is even possible to replicate from a Database as a Service where access to standard vendor replication facilities may not be available. While dbShards/Migrate continuously replicates transactions from the source to the target environment, customers can perform a reliable point-in-time snapshot of the source database, restoring it in the target environment with no lost data. It is even possible to perform the process several times to ensure full testing of the new cloud environment before switching live application servers to the target provider.
During our tests, Cloud SQL performed extremely well. Our objective was to provide our initial test customer (
http://www.genoo.com
) with a near-zero downtime transition of their database from their existing cloud vendor to Google Cloud SQL. Using the Cloud SQL capabilities, we were able to perform the process repeatedly — and flawlessly. In fact, our customer told us they did not even notice that the transition had occurred. You can read more
in this case study
.
An important factor with Cloud SQL is its built-in redundancy. As mentioned earlier, data written to Cloud SQL is stored multiple times in multiple locations, offering an incredible level of reliability. dbShards replication technology can be used to supplement Cloud SQL’s reliability, to perform seamless database modifications when needed — all without downtime.
dbShards is of course well-known for its industry leading database sharding capabilities. This will be of particular benefit to large database users in Cloud SQL, as currently Cloud SQL has a limit of 500GB per instance. Using dbShards, a customer can support multiple terabytes of data, completely eliminating this limitation as a concern.
Next steps for CodeFutures will be to benchmark our scalability in Cloud SQL, validating dbShards sharding capabilities and comparing the results to other cloud vendors and MySQL alternatives.
Learn more about dbShards/Migrate here
.
-Contributed by Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO, CodeFutures
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