MySQL Matters to Slashdot

Slashdot is a popular, traffic-heavy website for the open source community, highlighting "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters." It is updated 24/7 with the latest news, rumors, book reviews and opinions about all things open source as well as other items of interest to technologists, including natural science. Naturally, Slashdot has been running on the world's most popular open source database, MySQL, since the site's inception in 1997.

"We've done two database reviews in which we considered other open source and proprietary databases, and MySQL has come out on top both times," said Brian Aker, senior architect at Slashdot. "It's a nice, fast database, the maintenance costs are low, and very little hardware goes a long way with MySQL."

Slashdot utilizes four MySQL databases: a four-gigabyte, four-CPU primary database that performs most of the data reads and writes, another for replication, one for static content and another for back-up. MySQL handles about 360 queries per second, running on Intel hardware with the Linux operating system. "I have been using MySQL for a number of years, and I continue to be amazed at how well it scales, noted Aker.

The table handler InnoDB, now offered as a standard feature on the MySQL server, including full support of transactions, row-level locking and crash recovery, has been extremely useful to Slashdot. "We've done lots of work with InnoDB tables," said Aker. "It's been a great addition to MySQL, and it's very easy. And because many of the same performance-tuning tricks work with InnoDB and popular proprietary databases, it's easy to switch to MySQL from a database like Oracle."