WebScaleSQL Moving Forward

December 2016

WebScaleSQL began as a collaboration among engineers that had similar challenges in running MySQL at scale. Members of the MySQL community — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and eventually Alibaba — began working together to create a database technology tailored for their needs.

The collective goal of the companies was to enable the scale-oriented members of the MySQL community to work more closely together in order to prioritize the aspects that are most important to us. We learned over the course of this experiment, however, that sometimes each company need may not be similar enough to make sustained collaboration possible. Everyone was at different stages of MySQL lifecycle timelines; it wasn't productive to try to work on the same one. That's why, as you may have noticed, the WebScaleSQL collaborators are no longer contributing to the WebScaleSQL branch.

Many of the WebScaleSQL companies continue to make MySQL better through other projects: Alibaba with many changes for InnoDB performance, Facebook with MyRocks, Google with encrypted InnoDB. We'll continue a meet-up of WebscaleSQL participants at Percona Live once a year. It is always great to exchange ideas.