Continuing to drive MySQL innovation, Oracle has announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.2. Highlights of the announcement include the following:

• For highly demanding Web-based and communications products and services, MySQL Cluster is designed to cost-effectively deliver 99.999 percent availability, high write scalability and very low latency.

• With SQL and NoSQL access through a new Memcached API, MySQL Cluster represents a “best-of-both-worlds” solution allowing key value operations and complex SQL queries within the same database.

• With MySQL Cluster 7.2, users can also gain up to a 70 times increase in performance on complex queries, and enhanced multi-data center scalability.

• MySQL Cluster 7.2 is also certified with Oracle VM. The combination of its elastic, on-demand scalability and self-healing features, together with Oracle VM support, makes MySQL Cluster an ideal choice for deployments in the cloud.

• Also generally available is the latest release of the MySQL Cluster Manager, version 1.1.4, further improving the ease of use and administration of MySQL Cluster.

"MySQL Cluster 7.2 demonstrates Oracle’s investment in further strengthening MySQL’s position as the leading Web database,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle. “The performance and flexibility enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 provide users with a solid foundation for their mission-critical Web workloads, blending the best of SQL and NoSQL technologies to reduce risk, cost and complexity."

Increased Performance and Flexibility

• Enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 include:

• Higher Performance: Adaptive query localization delivers up to 70 times higher performance when executing complex queries. As a result, more applications can benefit from the capabilities of MySQL Cluster, such as running real-time analytics across live data sets.
• Increased Flexibility with New NoSQL Interface: NoSQL access to MySQL Cluster via the ubiquitous Memcached API enables users to speed up key value read and write operations.
• Enhanced Scalability: Multi-site clusters allow individual data nodes to be located in different data centers, with databases automatically sharded between them. Synchronous replication maintains data consistency and integrity between sites, with fast and automated failover and recovery. Enhanced active / active replication simplifies conflict detection and resolution across multiple active clusters, eliminating the requirement for developers to maintain a timestamp column in their applications.
• Improved Ease of Use and Administration: Shared user privilege tables consolidate previously distributed tables into the data nodes, making them accessible from all MySQL servers. This new feature removes the need for administrators to define and maintain privileges on each SQL node accessing the cluster.
• Oracle VM Certification: Virtualization support adds to features including auto-sharding, elastic scalability and self-healing, that makes MySQL Cluster an ideal choice for deploying highly demanding web and communications applications in the cloud. In addition to Oracle VM, MySQL Cluster is also certified with Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.

For more information, visit any of the following links:

• MySQL Cluster 7.2 download available under the GPL
• MySQL Cluster
• Guide to Scaling Web Databases with MySQL Cluster
• MySQL Cluster Flash Demo
• Oracle and MySQL
• MySQL Blog, Twitter, Facebook