While the acquisition of this Stockholm-based developer of clustering software for the telecom industry was promising, Zack Urlocker, MySQL AB's vice president of marketing, says the public-relations 'noise' volume was specially tuned to low. "We did not make a lot of noise about it at the time," says Urlocker. "Few people had ever heard of Alzato [previously described by Ericsson as a "venture."]. We waited until we could integrate it with our technology."

The "it" refers to Alzato's NDB Cluster, a parallel database server that was under development. In the world of telecommunications, a database is generally referred to as a network database (NDB). In telecom argot, networks are a collection of nodes performing a specific set of tasks. In particular, the three main network categories are service networks, management networks, and information networks. Cluster, in this case, simply indicates that it executes on a collection of workstations or personal computers.

Service networks are designed to help operate a telecommunications network in real time. Service-network databases need to support applications with high query rates and include number-portability, name-server, and route-server databases. For service-network databases, most requests are small; however, for some applications, response times must be as low as 1 to 5 ms.

Management networks support operations management functions in a telecommunications network. One classic example is a server that takes care of service charges by distributing toll-ticket records to various management systems. Typically, a charging server will need to interface with both network operations and information services provided in a telecommunications network. As a result, a charging-server NDB will receive roughly the same amount of messages as a service network NDB. On the other hand, a charging-server NDB will also need to store very large amounts of information and support more complex queries.

In the hierarchy of databases in telecommunications networks, the most sophisticated are information-network databases, which are integral to telecommunications services such as news-on-demand. These databases must support a high rate of messages per second, have a large storage capacity, and be able to send very large information streams at rates in the thousands of bits per second. Moreover, each application must fulfill very stringent requirements for reliability: The annual allowable downtime for a network database is less than one minute. To put this into perspective, more than 10 times as many users rely on network databases than on telecommunications switches.

	To end any question of MySQL being ready for the most strenuous corporate requirements, MySQL AB integrated an advanced parallel database server from the realm of telecommunications with the open source MySQL database. The goal was to enable clustering of the MySQL database for high reliability. When MySQL Cluster went live in April, MySQL AB promoted its technical advantages with the words "availability" and "failover" in plain view.		Open Reader Survey We risk losing too many customers if we are down for more that an hour a year. Yes No No Answer Being down over a few days a year wouldn't kill our business. Yes No No Answer Click for Current Tally

To achieve the requisite levels of availability and failover, MySQL AB followed the telecom approach of using a group of independent systems working together to provide a single, unified computing resource. With multiple machines running in parallel, should any one machine fail, others take over. In this way, clients and applications view the cluster as though it were a single system.

What's more, MySQL AB's Urlocker says,"We are bringing clustering into the mainstream," Echoing that thought, Alex Roedling, Senior Product Manager at MySQL AB, calls the new product "High Availability for the Masses." What they are excited over is a share-nothing cluster architecture that eliminates the operational support costs inherent in a traditional shared-disk cluster environment. High-availability solutions that once required expensive shared-disk environments are no longer the purview of just Fortune 1000 companies .

By placing databases on multiple nodes in such a way that if one fails another comes online, MySQL AB promotes MySQL Cluster as a means to deliver database applications with 99.999% availability. In telecom parlance, "five-nines" availability is rooted in the fact that telecommunication products require five to six nines—99.999 to 99.9999% reliability. Telecom companies may say they're "up" 99.999% of the year, which translates into five minutes of downtime per year. Six nines or 99.9999% uptime translates into just 30 seconds of downtime per year. For MySQL AB, being able to offer a good price-performance story is one thing; however, being able to qualify as compatible with “five-nines” architectural requirements will be all the better, if MySQL is to become the database of choice for more high-availability enterprise applications.

The product may be months' old, but MySQL AB already has a showcase customer in Sweden's Internet service provider Bredbandsbaloget (B2). This customer is using MySQL Cluster in a four-node setting in its core network operations platform. B2 is one of Sweden's largest broadband ISPs. An estimated 175,000 customers use its broadband Internet-access and VoIP services. Their MySQL Cluster helps to guarantee broadband access and voice-over-IP (VoIP) services to their customers.

Urlocker describes the advantages for an ISP like B2: "A DNS server going down would mean their customers being locked out for a couple of hours while they manually try to restart things. With MySQL Cluster, they enjoy the fact that they have greater reliability at a lower cost...and nobody has to get out of bed at four in the morning if something goes wrong."

It is easy to see that a "five-nines" story could go down readily in the telecom and ISP sectors where "availability" is a non-negotiable. How will MySQL Cluster be received beyond the realm of telecoms and ISPs? Well, what does it cost a company like Charles Schwab to go off-line for an hour?

MySQL AB is targeting adoption of the product by telecoms, financial institutions, Web-portal service businesses, and e-commerce outfits. A preview version of MySQL Cluster is available for download under the GPL from the MySQL Web site.  MySQL AB is offering MySQL Cluster under its "dual license" business model. It will be provided at no cost under the free software/open source GNU General Public License (GPL) for Open Source projects and also under a commercial license.

The official word from MySQL is, "Commercial (binary) availability is expected in Q3 2004." The commercial license will be less than $5,000 per processor, according to the MySQL Cluster press release from the company. Roedling told Open in late June that the estimated date  is "September, and that's tied to the 4.1 release" of MySQL.