The Twelve Days of Scale-Out: Wikipedia Enjoys Phenomenal Growth Thanks to MySQL

Open Source Database Helps Power the Free Encyclopedia’s Phenomenal Growth

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- June 15, 2007 -- MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today published a case study on Wikipedia's successful use of the MySQL database to help manage its massive popularity. The winner of the 2005 ‘MySQL Application of the Year’ Award, Wikipedia is today's featured user in the vendor's “Twelve Days of Scale-Out” educational initiative. Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site will be highlighting how many of the world’s fastest-growing Web sites and companies are using the MySQL database to cost-effectively scale-out their online operations. The campaign is live at www.mysql.com/scaleout.

Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst for Red Monk said, "The notion persists within many traditional enterprises that once you reach a certain level of application importance, it's necessary to transition to big, expensive boxes running big, expensive databases. However, free-thinking members of their IT staffs are beginning to ask the question: 'What can we learn from Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia on how to scale for high growth?' "

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the multilingual, Web-based, free encyclopedia that is produced collaboratively by volunteers. According to Alexa Traffic Rankings, Wikipedia consistently ranks in the Top Ten most-visited Web sites in the world. It hosts over 5 million articles in more than 100 languages. Every day, tens of millions of visitors learn more about their world -- making nearly a half-million edits and creating thousands of new entries.

Wikipedia’s ‘Growing’ Challenge

Wikipedia’s growth statistics are staggering. The organization has faced exponential growth on many fronts since its introduction in 2001. These include:

• Annual visitor growth from less than 50,000 to over 154 million
• Content growth from less than 100 articles to over 5 million
• Contributor growth from less than 100 to over 290,000

Wikipedia expects the growth in content, contributor and user-base to continue in all directions – and needs a computing infrastructure that will keep the pace.

Wikipedia’s MySQL Scale-Out Solution

This phenomenal growth has put constant technical pressure on the performance and scalability of the system. Wikipedia is based on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) and has grown from initially employing a single shared server to now being a Top Ten site, with more than 20 replicated database servers delivering up-to-date content to visitors. Additionally, lightweight MySQL instances are spread out on application servers as a distributed archive solution.

Wikipedia’s MySQL databases handle over 25,000 SQL queries per second.

Wikipedia relies upon MySQL replication to scale-out their database infrastructure and accommodate more visitors, more articles and more contributors. This architecture also allows them to save significantly on hardware costs. Since they add new servers only on an incremental, as-needed basis, they can delay their new hardware purchases until more powerful machines drop to lower, commodity prices.

What is Scale-Out?

Scale-Out is a modern computing architecture that enables organizations to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware. This is in contrast to a ‘Scale-Up’ approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.

On June 20, MySQL will be hosting a special worldwide Webinar titled, “Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses”. To register for this event, please visit www.mysql.com/scaleoutwebinar.

About MySQL

MySQL AB develops and supports a family of high-performance, affordable database products. The company’s flagship offering is 'MySQL Enterprise’, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software, with over 11 million active installations. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia and YouTube.

With headquarters in the United States and Sweden -- and operations around the world -- MySQL AB supports both open source values and corporate customers' needs in a profitable, sustainable business model. For more information about MySQL, please visit www.mysql.com.

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MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the USA and other countries. Other products or company names mentioned may be the trademarks of their respective corporations.