SchoonerSQL – MySQL On Steroids

While MySQL has been an unqualified success, there have always been whispers and regrets from those looking to use the open source database in mission critical situations. If you need five 9’s type of availability and other large enterprise features, MySQL may not have been able to scale up for you. But of course if you were Oracle and you owned MySQL, that was not too large a problem because if MySQL wasn’t enterprise enough, they had another database that they could sell you that would scale to the biggest jobs. Now a company called SchoonerSQL wants to give you a MySQL version that does scale out.

While SchoonerSQL is not open sourced, it owes much of its existence to the fact that MySQL is open source.  They have a commercial license from Oracle to sell their version of MySQL with the Schooner enhancements. But because the commercial version of MySQL is based on the open source version, Schooner had access to the source code which allowed them to make the modifications and improvements they have made.  If they had started with a closed source database, chances are the commercial license they had would not have given them source code access to make these changes.

What changes have they made? Well according to Jerry Rudisin, CEO of Schooner who I spoke to the other day, Schooner brings this to standard MySQL:

• Does high-speed fully synchronous replication across a LAN
• Does high-speed asynchronous replication across LAN or WAN
• Guarantees no lost, stale, or corrupt data, and no slave lag
• Provides immediate automated failover across LAN or WAN
• Offers unlimited read scaling
• Offers unlimited write scaling (through our integration with dbShards)
• Radically simplifies cluster administration
• Delivers great performance on hard drives, flash drives, and SAN

All of this adds up to 5 9s type of availability on the familiar MySQL platform.  Schooner also promises 100% compatibility with MySQL as well.

Of course one has to wonder about Oracle’s feelings in all of this. If you used MySQL and want a database that is more scalable with more enterprise features, Oracle may just have something to sell you. But Rudisin says that Oracle to date has been a picture perfect partner, supporting Schooner and being cooperative in any way possible.  Personally, I think Oracle will be supportive until they feel that they are losing more money by not upgrading Schooner customers to Oracle than they are making selling MySQL licenses through Schooner.

All in all, Schooner seems to have hit on yet another way to leverage open source software into a successful business model. The company is venture capital supported with investments from CMEA Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures. In addition to the SchoonerSQL product, they also offer Membrain, a commercial variant of the popular memcached optimized for flash memory.