MySQL: The Twelve Days of Scaleout

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.