Top 10 Reasons why CSPs use MySQL

MySQL offers a combination of products co-developed with some of the world's largest suppliers to the telecommunications market, coupled with deep industry expertise and 24x7 global support, enabling you to address the toughest data management challenges of the communications industry.

1. Scalability and Flexibility

MySQL provides the ultimate in scalability, sporting the capacity to handle deeply embedded applications with a footprint of a few megabytes to running carrier grade databases supporting 60m subscribers, to massive data warehouses of CDRs holding terabytes of customer and call information. Platform flexibility is a stalwart feature of MySQL with all flavors of Linux, UNIX, and Windows being supported. And, of course, the open source nature of MySQL allows complete customization for those wanting to add unique requirements to the database server.

“Paggo would not have been possible without MySQL Cluster. No other product would have give us the ability to start small, scale quickly and provide 24 x7 availability for our financial payment system over mobile networks.”
Cicero Torteli,
Founder Paggo

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2. High Performance, Low Latency

MySQL Cluster provides the response time and throughput to meet the most demanding high volume telecommunications services & applications. MySQL Cluster achieves its performance advantage by being a main memory clustered database solution, which keeps all data in memory and limits IO bottlenecks by asynchronously writing transaction logs to disk. MySQL Cluster also enables servers to share processing within a cluster, taking full advantage of all hardware. Typical response times for MySQL Cluster are in the range of a few milliseconds and MySQL Cluster has been proven to handle tens of thousands of distributed transactions per second that are also replicated across database nodes for high availability and sub-second failover.

“Performance is absolutely critical...MySQL Cluster won the performance test hands-down. Moreover, competing alternatives offered inferior performance at higher cost”.
Alain Chastagner,
Alcatel Lucent

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3. Carrier-Grade Availability, Fast Failover & No Single Point of Failure

MySQL Cluster provides a fault tolerant architecture that ensures your organization's mission critical applications achieve 99.999% availability. This means less than 5 minutes downtime per year, including scheduled maintenance time. MySQL Cluster uses synchronous replication to propagate transaction information to all other database nodes in the cluster, so that applications can automatically fail over to another node extremely quickly. This eliminates the time consuming operation of recreating and replaying log files required by 'Shared-Disk' architectures. Plus, MySQL Cluster database nodes are able to automatically restart, recover, and dynamically reconfigure themselves in case of failures, without having to program advanced features into the application. The parallel server architecture can be distributed across computers and geographies to ensure there is no single point of failure.

4. Unique Expertise to Blend the Worlds of the Network & the IT Domains

MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition has become the relational database of choice in the network domain, powering real-time, carrier-grade subscriber solutions for the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Ericsson. MySQL Server is also the database of choice for the web with deployments in some of the most prolific names including Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. As a result, no other database company can provide the insight and experience to marry the network and IT worlds of the Communications Service Provider.

Standardizing on MySQL also enhances developer and DBA productivity and supports CSPs' initiatives to reduce the number of vendors supplying IT infrastructure, while reducing vendor lock-in.

5. Lower Maintenance Costs & Easy-to-use Administration

MySQL Cluster is designed to be largely self-governing so very few system parameters actually need fine-tuning, further reducing the risk of costly errors. As a result, there are typically fewer conflicts with other software and hardware, and less need for manual intervention. This also means that MySQL Cluster will have much lower maintenance costs, with less fine tuning required by Database Administrators.

MySQL Enterprise takes just 15 minutes to download and start using. MySQL Enterprise Monitor software provides a "Virtual DBA” that monitors production database applications and minimizes security vulnerabilities, improves replication, and optimizes performance with built-in best practices through Expert Advisors and Query Analyzer.

6. Delivering Customer Insight with Leading Data Warehousing Capabilities

With its unique pluggable storage engine architecture, MySQL offers several server solutions for CSPs wanting to experience the benefits of open source data warehousing. The MyISAM storage engine delivers rapid data loading capabilities, fast read times, and much more for data warehousing users. Infobright offers a storage engine for the MySQL Server that is tailor-made for large scale, analytic-styled data warehousing. Infobright enables MySQL users to move up to data warehouses that support data volumes of 1-10TB or more with key capabilities including a column-oriented design, high data compression capabilities, advanced optimizer with "Knowledge Grid" and high-speed loader.

“The MySQL Server is a core technology in our distributed data cluster that handles over 2TB of data per week. By using MySQL, we have been able to reduce our costs while maintaining high availability across our client applications.”
Rick Levenson,
Sr. Vice President of Service Delivery,
TellMe Networks

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7. Robust Transactional Support

MySQL Server offers one of the most powerful transactional database engines on the market. Features include complete ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable) transaction support, unlimited row-level locking, distributed transaction capability, and multi-version transaction support where readers never block writers and vice-versa.

8. Comprehensive Application Development & Data Access

One of the reasons MySQL is the world's most popular open source database is that it provides comprehensive support for every application development need. Within the database, support can be found for stored procedures, triggers, functions, views, cursors, ANSI-standard SQL, and more. For embedded applications, plug-in libraries are available to embed MySQL database support into nearly any application. MySQL Cluster also provides connectors and drivers (ODBC, JDBC, etc.) that allow all forms of applications to make use of MySQL as a preferred data management server. It doesn't matter if it's C++, Java, LDAP, SIP, HTTP, PHP, Perl or .NET, MySQL offers application developers everything they need to be successful in building database-driven information systems. CSPs can access the world's largest development pool as MySQL is download 65,000 times per day and is the de-facto database for on-line applications and open-source development.

“We rely on MySQL because it has become the database of choice for developers and the open source community”.
Massimo Bandinelli,
Register.it SPA

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9. Open Source Freedom and 24 x 7 Support

Through MySQL licenses and subscription options, CSPs can get access to 24x7 Production Support to ensure continuous availability for production database applications, in addition to full indemnification. MySQL Support gives CSPs priority access with fast response times to assist with the development, deployment and management of MySQL applications, with the flexibility to choose a service level matching specific CSP requirements. Virgin Mobile are using the MySQL Enterprise Platinum offering to power their CRM, billing and order management systems, with guaranteed access to MySQL support expertise in 30 minutes or less, 24x7, 365 days a year. Read More »

MySQL also provides extensive consulting and services to ensure the success of your next mission-critical database application project. MySQL has a proven track record gained through millions of successful customer deployments that can lower your risk and maximize return on investment.

10. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

By migrating current database-driven applications to MySQL, or using MySQL for new development projects, CSPs are realizing cost savings that often stretch into seven figures. Accomplished through the use of the MySQL database server and scale-out architectures that utilize low-cost commodity hardware, CSPs are finding that they can achieve amazing levels of scalability and performance, all at a cost that is far less than those offered by proprietary and scale-up software vendors. In addition, the reliability and easy maintainability of MySQL means that database administrators don't waste time troubleshooting performance or downtime issues, but instead can concentrate on making a positive impact on higher level tasks that involve the business side of data.

“With MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, we have successfully migrated to an ATCA-based Linux platform. This has allowed us to standardize our platform to take advantage of an open IT blade solution and at the same time, keep the high levels of scalability and availability required by our customers, including Tier 1.”
Hervé Saliou,
Business Manager,
Subscriber Database Management BU,
Alcatel-Lucent

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