A while back a Sun engineer posted an article claiming that the best way to scale MySQL is to shard your database in many instances on a single server, each of which runs in threads that individually have low performance. The Sun way has always been to get high throughput with high latency. And that’s fine. Others have commented on the real-world applicability of this technique with MySQL, so I won’t.

But what I’m interested in is something the author says in the comments of his own blog post:

btw; we are working on a scalable replacement of InnoDB. Stay tuned….

What is it?

Surely it’s not Falcon. MySQL and Sun have said many times Falcon isn’t meant to be an InnoDB replacement.

The next question: how should we interpret the word “scalable” given the context? Clearly there’s a difference of opinion between MrBenchmark and others on what that word means. So what will the scaling characteristics of this InnoDB replacement really be?

The following is a joke, not meant to be taken seriously: Maybe it will be MyISAM with a fix to the key buffer scalability problems. Start with your database with 50 tables. Make 1 million databases, each with the same 50 tables, and you can scale up to 1 million rows by putting 1 row in each table. Ta-da! Row-level locking with MyISAM!

But seriously, what is it?