Using MySQL As NoSQL - Introduction to HandlerSocket Plugin

Most of high scale web applications use MySQL + memcached. Many of them use also NoSQL like TokyoCabinet/Tyrant. In some cases people have dropped MySQL and have shifted to NoSQL. One of the biggest reasons for such a movement is that it is said that NoSQL performs better than MySQL for simple access patterns such as primary key lookups. Most of queries from web applications are simple so this seems like a reasonable decision. Like many other high scale web sites, we at DeNA had similar issues for years. But we reached a different conclusion. We developed HandlerSocket Plugin – a MySQL plugin that speaks NoSQL network protocols. HandlerSocket has the following features/advantages.

• Supporting lots of query patterns
• Can handle lots of concurrent connections
• Extremely high performance
• No duplicate cache
• No data inconsistency
• Crash-safe
• SQL can be used from mysql clients
• All operational benefits from MySQL
• No need to modify/rebuild MySQL
• Independent from storage engines

In our benchmarks, we could get 750,000+ read qps on a commodity MySQL/InnoDB 5.1 server from remote web clients. We also have got excellent performance on production environments. In this session, we’d like to share our experiences. We’ll talk about what HandlerSocket can do, how it performs with reads and writes, where and how we use in production, etc.