• Overview
  • Schooner MySQL with Active Cluster
  • Schooner Membrain
  • Supported Platforms
  • Pricing and Licensing
  • The Schooner Advantage

Schooner MySQL Enterprise

Schooner MySQL® Enterprise™ * (or Schooner MySQL) is a complete MySQL + InnoDB distribution created by Schooner under license from Oracle. It's based on the commercial source code for MySQL and InnoDB and certified by Oracle as 100% compatible. Schooner MySQL is optimized for maximum multi-threading to deliver the maximum value from multi-core x86 processors, and has additional optimizations to fully exploit the performance advantages of flash memory. Flash memory is a revolutionary memory and storage technology, 100x faster than hard drives with 1/100th the power consumption of DRAM. Multi-core processors allow parallel execution of multiple threads. If only there was a way to fully exploit these advances for MySQL, you could do a lot more with a lot less hardware. That's exactly what Schooner delivers.

Schooner MySQL:

• Reduces the need for sharding across multiple masters;
• Allows dramatic consolidation of slaves;
• Enables extreme vertical scale-up by fully exploiting flash memory on commodity servers for DRAM-like performance;
• Enables new revenue-producing business opportunities based on rapid access to fast flash memory;
• Supports multi-tenancy, in which completely different MySQL databases can share the same Schooner-powered server;
• Is fully certified as 100% compatible by Oracle/MySQL, making it easy to use in your environment;
• Runs on a wide range of x86 servers with flash drives, with the database stored in flash memory or FlashCache; and
• Works with flash drives from all major suppliers including Fusion-io, Unigen, LSI, OCZ, and Intel.

We achieved this by optimizing and tuning InnoDB for maximum concurrency to fully exploit the power of multi-core x86 processors and flash memory. If you use MySQL with InnoDB today, you can use Schooner MySQL with InnoDB just as easily — and with far better economics and performance.

Schooner MySQL includes full support for traditional MySQL asynchronous replication. Schooner also offers Schooner MySQL® Enterprise™ with Active Cluster™, an enhanced distribution of Schooner MySQL. Active Cluster adds synchronous replication, immediate automatic failover, and radically simplified cluster management to the benefits listed above. And, unlike Schooner MySQL, Active Cluster delivers high availability and great performance whether the database is on hard drives or flash.

Customer Experiences

Schooner customers value the server consolidation and cost savings delivered by Schooner MySQL. For example, a social networking company saw an immediate 9x throughput improvement using Schooner. Another achieved a 10:1 reduction in the number of slaves by using Schooner rather than traditional MySQL on its servers, realizing significant reductions in server capex, space and power consumption, and application complexity.

Schooner customers also like the ability to run large master databases with very high throughput and excellent response time, reducing sharding. For example, by using Schooner MySQL rather than traditional MySQL on an IBM dual quad-core x86 server, a Web 2.0 financial services company is seeing a 5x performance improvement in query response time and throughput for business analytics applications that require heavy dynamic updates and inserts against its 1TB MySQL database.

If your demanding applications rely on MySQL you can rely on Schooner MySQL to deliver better performance, smoother scalability, and much lower cost on the hardware you already have or are thinking of buying. You can see for yourself by downloading Schooner MySQL for a free trial.

Scale Smart, With Schooner

Organizations that use MySQL often spend a lot more on servers and their operating expenses than they'd like. Their datacenters often find it hard to scale out efficiently as demands on MySQL grow. The old way to scale has been to add lots of servers and shard the data across them, carefully keeping each database small enough to largely fit in the server's DRAM. But datacenters that scale this way often see very low levels of utilization on their servers. This can deliver high performance but it's grossly inefficient.

Schooner MySQL offers a better way.

Take an x86 server of the typical horsepower used to run a demanding MySQL application. Run another MySQL distribution and measure its performance using a standard benchmark such as DBT-2 with a heavy workload. Take the same server running Schooner MySQL and measure against the same benchmark. If you're running on HDDs, Schooner MySQL with flash memory delivers an order-of-magnitude performance gain. If you're already running on flash with an alternative MySQL, Schooner MySQL is 2x - 3x faster. Yes, your workload's mileage may vary for many reasons, but the test will show the power of Schooner's Software Appliance approach to super-charge commodity hardware.

Using Schooner MySQL and flash memory on your existing x86 servers lets each server do a lot more work at much lower cost. When you need new servers, you can buy the right configurations from your preferred server and flash vendors, and you'll buy a lot less hardware than you'd otherwise need. Learn more about our supported platforms.

Aside from delivering better performance and superior economics than any other version of MySQL, Schooner MySQL also delivers better performance and superior economics than any of the NoSQL solutions on the market! Except, of course, our own Membrain (the smart NoSQL data store, based on memcached). If you think that MySQL cannot scale to handle your load, though you really want the comfort and convenience of a full ACID database, use Schooner MySQL. We greatly extend the range over which MySQL can scale.

* The formal name of this product is "the Schooner Appliance for MySQL® Enterprise™ with Active Cluster." From Schooner's founding, one of our goals was to optimize MySQL and InnoDB for maximum multi-threading and tightly couple the result with multi-core x86 processors, fast flash memory, and run-time software that caches between DRAM and flash to deliver DRAM-like performance from the flash. We achieved this, delivering in 2009 our first MySQL release as a turnkey appliance on an IBM x86 server, Intel flash drives, and consistent BIOS and controller firmware. Our pre-integration was then necessary to ensure a great end-user experience. Now Active Cluster and Schooner MySQL are pure software products that run on Dell, HP, and IBM x86 servers, with HDDs or flash from any vendor. But our formal product name still honors our vision of tightly-coupling the software with commodity hardware. You can think of it as a "software appliance."