Facebook & Others Announce WebScaleSQL

A number of tech companies including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter announced WebScaleSQL on Thursday as a project that adapts MySQL to their massively bigger database needs.

WebScaleSQL is a branch of MySQL designed to run MySQL at scale and gaining maximum performance from the database.

The WebScaleSQL.org project site says, "We aim to create a more integrated system of knowledge-sharing to help companies leverage the great features already found in MySQL 5.6, while building and adding more features that are specific to deployments in large scale environments. In the last few months, engineers from all four companies have contributed code and provided feedback to each other to develop a new, more unified, and more collaborative branch of MySQL."

The WebScaleSQL source is derived from Oracle's MySQL 5.6 Community release.Among the added features right now are a full suite of stress tests for automated performance testing, changes to improve the performance with better pool flushing improvements, optimizations for certain types of queries, support for NUMA interleave policy, and various scaling improvements to the database server.

This news comes just days after Facebook announced the Hack language as a high-performance PHP alternative, Facebook begins trying out Btrfs, and PostgreSQL began taking on MongoDB.