dbShards™ Cloud Edition
dbShards Cloud Edition brings all of the reliability and scalability benefits of dbShards to Amazon EC2 environments managed by RightScale. Cloud computing offers unparalleled flexibility when scaling high volume web applications by allowing additional application server instances to be added on demand. However, if the application is designed to use a single MySQL instance then this will be a contention point limiting the effectiveness of the cloud, especially since individual EC2 instances have limited CPU and memory.
With slower recovery times, reliable replication and failover is even more important on the cloud. Standard MySQL replication is unreliable - transactions are replicated asynchronously and there is a high likelihood of transaction loss in the event of a failure of a master database. dbShards patent-pending reliable replication solves these problems without sacrificing performance.
dbShards Cloud Edition makes it possible to split a single database into multiple shards, each hosted on a separate EC2 instance, allowing the database to be scaled as easily as the application. dbShards Cloud Edition is priced on a per-hour usage basis.
A free version of dbShards Cloud Edition is available as a RightScale template. This is a replication-only version of the product and is free for customers with small databases (up to 1GB).
Performance & Scalability
dbShards does not add any overhead on reads but dbShards and all other reliable replication products do add some overhead on write operations because the write transaction must be communicated to the secondary or slave server. Reliable replication products that are based on a middle tier add so much overhead that writes are limited to tens or hundreds of writes per second, even on powerful hardware. dbShards uses patent-pending technology to provide reliability while maintaining high performance. The following graph demostrates that dbShards can perform up to 1,800 writes (inserts) per second when running on large EC2 instances.
These benchmarks were produced by running the dbShards bookstore sample application, which ships with the product. The application models a realistic business application with inserts into a number of related tables with foreign keys and indexes.
Performance tests run on 9/4/2009 with dbShards version 2.1.0-b29 with three 'large' EC2 instances (client, primary database server and secondary database server).
Getting Started
dbShards Cloud Edition is available as a ServerTemplate in the Partner tab when adding a new EC2 instance via the RightScale console. The template ships with a fully working demonstration application that can be deployed instantly, making it very simple to try out dbShards. Full instructions are contained in this PDF tutorial.
�dbShards Cloud Edition Tutorial
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