MySQL to get dynamic load balancing in 2008

MySQL will introduce dynamic load balancing to its database platform and enterprise subscription in 2008.

That news surfaced during a briefing Thursday with MySQL executives about the open source database company’s forthcoming 5.1 and 6.0 upgrades.

Zack Urlocker, Executive Vice President of Products at MySQL, said the load balancing software will ship as part of the next generation MySQL 6.X platform that entered alpha testing earlier this month.

The 6.0 platform – in the 6.1 or 6.2 release cycle -- will feature a new storage engine known as ‘Falcon” that is optimized for multicore processors and large memory systems as well as a new proxy server that will serve as a middleware layer between the client and database server that prioritizes queries and workloads based on user input.

The dynamic load balancing component will be offered as an add on to that proxy server and will be part of the enterprise subscription in mid 2008, Urlocker said. “We built a higher level product for dynamic load balancing across many servers,” he said during our briefing Thursday. “The hallmark of mySQL is that it gets used in scaled out server settings.”

In the more immediate future, MySQL is preparing to release MySQL Enterprise 5.1, a significant upgrade that features a new enterprise monitor for monitoring server farms, SNMP support and a replication advisor that checks the replication topology and makes sure it is running well across multiple servers, Urlocker said.

This week, the company announced that the first release candidate of version 5.1, also referred to as the MySQL Fall 2007 Release, will be available on Friday or Monday. The final product is exepcted to ship next quarter, Urlocker said.

The 6.0 platform only recently entered alpha testing and won’t be available until mid 2008, he added.