Oracle has announced the general availability of the MySQL Cluster 7.2 database. Engineered for web-based apps and services that need high write scalability and very low latency, Oracle claims that the new release will deliver 99.999% availability. MySQL Cluster aims to provide a ‘best of both worlds’ solution by providing SQL and NoSQL access through a new memcached API.

Along with enhanced multi-data center scalability, MySQL Cluster 7.2 is also certified with Oracle VM. Oracle is extolling the virtues of MySQL Cluster on the basis of its on-demand scalability and its self-healing features. The company says that these aspects, together with Oracle VM support, makes MySQL Cluster a good choice for deployments in the cloud.

"MySQL Cluster 7.2 demonstrates Oracle's investment in further strengthening MySQL's position as the leading web database," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle. "The performance and flexibility enhancements in MySQL Cluster 7.2 provide users with a solid foundation for their mission-critical web workloads, blending the best of SQL and NoSQL technologies to reduce risk, cost, and complexity."

So essentially, MySQL Cluster 7.2 enables users to deploy a distributed, highly scalable database with both SQL and NoSQL interfaces, with the ability to perform complex queries or multi-table transactions with ACID guarantees. Users can perform both simple key value and complex queries across the same data set in the same database.

Multi-site clusters allow individual data nodes to be located in different data centers, with databases automatically sharded between them. Synchronous replication maintains data consistency and integrity between sites, with fast and automated failover and recovery. Enhanced active / active replication simplifies conflict detection and resolution across multiple active clusters, eliminating the requirement for developers to maintain a timestamp column in their applications.