InnoDB Website

Featured User Stories

Sulake Corporation is a leading online entertainment company, focused on virtual worlds and social networking. Sulake’s main product, Habbo, is the world’s largest virtual world for teens, operating in dozens of local markets and attracting millions of unique visitors monthly, and millions of visits per day. Habbo users are especially engaged and active, averaging many hours of active play per month per user.

Sulake operates four data centers around the globe and hosts a total of three dozen production database servers, nearly 100 MySQL instances and 3-4 terabytes of managed data. The busiest databases peak at 16,000 operations per second per instance.

Osma Ahvenlampi, Chief Technology Officer at Sulake, said, “Since we chose MySQL and InnoDB, our scale has grown more than a hundredfold, and the technology has managed to keep pace. Most of our revenue comes from direct end-user micro-transactions, so a reliable technical infrastructure is critical to our success. InnoDB provides the reliability and performance we need.” In summary, Ahvenlampi says, “the combination of our proprietary technology for virtual worlds and social networking, and the cost-efficiencies of MySQL and InnoDB enable our business to grow and thrive.”

DC Energy is an energy trading firm whose methodology relies on in-depth, fundamental analysis of supply and demand. DC Energy professionals trade more than 40 GW of power in the United States and Canada every hour in real time, 24×7 year-round. They rely on real-time price updates and concurrent analysis to be aware of immediately available trades and to develop future trading strategies.

DC Energy has eight servers for redundancy and parallel processing of analysis. Each server hosts over 700 GB of data, all stored in InnoDB. Overall usage is nearly 500 queries per second across all servers, of which more than 35% are writes.

Ware Adams, Managing Director at DC Energy says, “As a start up, we were drawn to MySQL because of the low initial cost, but our work would not be possible today within MySQL without InnoDB.” Adams notes that “InnoDB’s row level locking allows real time updates while simultaneously supporting concurrent analysis of the most recent data. With literally billions of values dependent on other variables, we rely heavily on ensuring consistency across tables, and InnoDB enforces referential integrity across our entire data set.”

DC Energy uses InnoDB Hot Backup to take snapshots of the database without disrupting operations, to build slaves and scale out with zero downtime. Adams says, “We have not had to shut down a server to build a slave or backup a table in nearly four years. InnoDB’s stability and affordable, quality support allows access to all of these features with minimal investment of both cash and time.”

Linden Lab® is the developer of the Second Life Grid™, the platform behind the world’s largest user-created 3D online virtual world Second Life®. On Second Life, Residents can create objects, write code, trade using virtual currency, form groups, host events, or really anything else. Residents buy, sell, build, and rebuild constantly, creating high volumes of myriad transaction types. The Second Life Grid keeps track of tens of thousands of servers, millions of users, tens of millions of scripts, hundreds of millions of monetary transactions, and billions of stored objects.

At the heart of the Second Life Grid is MySQL using InnoDB storage. “InnoDB delivers the performance necessary for our high-query-load OLTP environment, without requiring complex workload-specific tuning or exotic server hardware”, says Ian Wilkes, Vice President of Systems Engineering at Linden Lab. “Crucially, InnoDB also meets our demanding requirements for high reliability, robust data integrity, and ACID-compliant transaction processing.”

Dathan Vance Pattishall of the photo-sharing service Flickr writes, InnoDB is the MySQL storage engine of choice for Flickr, due to its utmost stability and speed for our application. With InnoDB, we are able to achieve billions of transactions per day at a fraction of the cost of other database technologies. InnoDB is able to meet the demands of our highly mixed traffic while offering the ability to backup data without interruption of service.

Google

Google runs critical business systems with InnoDB and MySQL. The systems require 24×7 operation with minimal downtime. The systems support large OLTP and reporting workloads. We are very happy with the scalability, reliability and manageability of this software.

Domas Mituzas, DBA & Site Engineer at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, says The InnoDB-based MySQL solution is critical in building efficient high-performance database environments, especially when scale-out strategies are applied.

Paycom.net provides on-line credit card and check processing. Clarke Retzer, Chief Systems Engineer at Paycom, says We require 24×7 availability and high performance for financial transaction processing. We can’t afford any downtime or data loss. InnoDB and MySQL provide database technology that aligns with our business philosophy. Without InnoDB’s transactions and efficient row locking, we would not be able to use MySQL as the basis for our company’s operations. In addition to a fantastic storage engine, Innobase has built a great backup utility in InnoDB Hot Backup, and we backup our large databases a few times a week. When the inevitable hardware issues do arise, with the InnoDB storage engine and InnoDB Hot Backup we can recover our database in a matter of minutes, and be back online ready to work.

RightNow Technologies is a provider of online customer relationship management solutions. RightNow is a longtime MySQL user. We converted to InnoDB a few years ago, which allowed us to scale our application much higher that was previously possible. We are pleased with the overall performance and reliability that InnoDB provides,, says Ryan Huddleston, DBA Manager at RightNow.

Case studies on the MySQL website

• Read the EDS/Sabre case study from the MySQL website
• Read the T-Systems case study from the MySQL website
• Read the Associated Press case study from the MySQL website

Other User stories

Several well known companies and communities have migrated to InnoDB.