MySQL 4.1 Production Ready
From OSNews,
MySQL announced the general availability of MySQL 4.1. Certified by the company as production-ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, this significant upgrade to the MySQL database server features advanced querying capabilities through subqueries, faster and more secure client-server communication, new installation and configuration tools, and support for international character sets and geographic data.
MySQL is one of the most used databases when administrators are building their own log analysis infrastructure. Back at Cable & Wireless America, I built a reporting infrastructure from scratch using MySQL as the backend. The database ran on a E420 Sun server with 4 procs, 4 GB memory and two 300GB T3 arrays (fiber channel SAN).
This setup was sufficient for supporting several hundred customers and generating daily, weekly and monthly reports. It also provided real-time raw log view for the customers.
MySQL (3.23 when I first built it) was stable, extremely fast in both insertion rate and query speed. It was used heavily with loads into the database every 5 minutes (real-time analysis were done outside of the DB). We were receiving ~2000 events per second after fine tuning the firewall and IDS’s logging. It can run for months without a single issue.
If you are considering building your own logging infrastructure and don’t want to pay SIM vendors a large chunk of cash, and have the in house expertise to create the reports and analysis engine, I say definitely give MySQL a try.
Another must-have tool for building your own logging infrastructure is Syslog-NG, which we will discuss in more details later.