Working to make clear that it is a database for the big boys, MySQL is running a series of posts on their web site called The Twelve Days of Scale Out. Each day features a different customer who has taken MySQL to the moon. Today’s feature (Day 5) covers Wikipedia.
The page quotes Redmonk analyst Steven O’Grady:
“The notion persists within many traditional enterprises that once you reach a certain level of application importance, it is 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?’ “
Here are a few stats from the article. Wikipedia has:
- More than 154 million annual visitors
- More than 5 million articles
- More than 290,000 contributors
- Nearly half a million edits each day
- 25,000 SQL queries/second
- 20 servers, with MySQL replication used to add more as needed
I was actually a bit surprised by the low server count. I would have expected more, given Wikipedia’s traffic.
Disclosure: I am on the board of MySQL and O’Reilly produces the MySQL User Conference for MySQL AB.