Feedback about MySQL Cluster in production environment
Hello,
I am currently evaluating MySQL Cluster, and I'm somewhat suprised by the feeble number of entries returned when googling for keywords such as "MySQL Cluster in production" or "MySQL Cluster experience", especially since this is a "mature" product (first release in 2004, good documentation).
On paper this is an outstanding product, which seems to answer many needs (sharding, high availability, transactions, geo-replication, etc.), so why is it not more widely adopted? Sorry if my question sounds rude or naive, but this is the feeling I get.
I plan to use the cluster to store users/roles/organizations (50 million users), this would be the "central point" for user authentication and access control.
The mysql site obviously holds "official" customer references (http://www.mysql.com/customers/cluster/), but I would be curious to know if someone could share their "overall" experience using this solution in production, with either "critical" or "big" data. I know that running a cluster does not exempt you from performing backups (so much for the "critical data" side) and from carefully planing your data sharding and query patterns (so much for the "big data" side), but nothing replaces real life stories happening after running the cluster for several months/years. I rummaged through the first 10 pages of the cluster forum (there are 67 pages!), but nothing really caught my attention.
I have installed the cluster on 4 nodes and started playing with it, so far so good, I even intend to later test geo replication, but before investing in time consuming tests such as loading millions of rows in a "complex" schema, and accessing it concurrently using some tool such as mysqlslap, I would definitely like to get the opinion of experienced users regarding the stability, resilience, etc.
Thank you in advance for sharing your experience,
Best regards,
Pierre Sion