Bangalore: The MySQL cluster software has been updated by Oracle to make it more alluring to big web service providers and other users of large-volume distributed databases.

MySQL is the world's most used relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released for general availability to users on Wednesday, "It is a huge step forward for MySQL Cluster, taking it further into the Web market," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL engineering for Oracle.

This new software permits applications to access data directly rather than go through the SQL engine using a memcached API (application programming interface). Another feature of this software is that it implements a faster way of executing complex queries, or queries that involve joining data from multiple tables.

With these two new features, the Cluster can offer the best attributes of both SQL and NoSQL databases, Ulin explained. It can rival the fast key value operations of NoSQL, while still offering the ability to do complex SQL queries of a regular SQL database.

This software is designed in a very strategic way that if one server or node fails, then the cluster retains all data and continues to operate without any issues. This software has been configured to run across multiple servers and is a version of the open-source MySQL database. The cluster has no shared memory or disk space i.e. it uses a shared-nothing architecture, this unique feature helps systems scale or upgrade to an unlimited number or nodes.

The Cluster has been more commonly deployed in the telecommunications field. "You can go to any continent and find mobile networks that have deployed MySQL Cluster," Ulin said. Telecommunications companies enjoy the cluster software's ability to scale easily, as well as the ability to recall data no matter how recently it was written to disk. They also enjoy the fact that it can run on low-cost commodity servers, Ulin said.

With this release, Oracle has prepped MySQL Cluster with new features that should make it particularly well-suited for large-scale Web applications, Ulin said. "We've seen telecoms and Web merging together. The requirements for the telecommunications industry are becoming requirements for the Web industry: [very] low latency, high availability and scaling. We see a very good fit here," Ulin said. The software would be suitable for Web service tasks such as user profile management, session management, online gaming and high-volume OLTP (online transaction processing).

MySQL Cluster 7.2 is delivering the first version that provides access to its data via an API memcached. Used by many large Web services like Facebook, memcached provides a hash table of the elements of frequently accessed data stored in server memory for faster access, via an API (Application Programming Interface).

"Persistent Memcached is a useful thing," said Curt Monash of Monash Research, noting that sales of the Couchbase NoSQL database, built on Memcached, have been quite strong.

"MySQL has always given good performance when used just as a key-value store," Monash said. "So it's reasonable to hope the Memcached interface will have good performance out of the box."

In addition to updating MySQL Cluster, the company has also certified the software to work within Oracle VM environments. Oracle has also updated MySQL Cluster's stand-alone administrative package, MySQL Cluster Manager, which is now at version 1.1.4.