Spider for MySQL and Scalability

Question

I'm interested to know if anyone is using Spider for MySQL engine to scale MySQL. I need to be able to scale my database beyond the 1TB limit of Amazon RDS and Spider seems like a good solution, allowing you to query the server in the "cluster" as if it was one big database.

There isn't any in-depth documentation and talk about this technology and I wonder how good it is?

Answer 1

Spider for MySQL has no documentation and the code has no test suite. It seems to be developed by a single developer.

The project hasn't had any release since 2012-02 (9 months ago as of this writing), and its last release was version 2.28 for MySQL 5.5.14 (the current release is MySQL 5.5.28). Launchpad shows no code commits since 2011-05 (18 months ago).

This makes me wonder if the final changes for 2.28 were never actually committed to source control. This makes me doubt the software quality.

While Spider for MySQL is a valiant proof of concept, I would consider it an abandoned experiment.
Given all of the above, I would not recommend it for production use.

As for your scaling problem, I think you have these choices:

• Adapt your application architecture to support multiple db instances.
• Trim down your data so it fits within 1TB.
  
  • Archive less-used data and indexes.
  • Choose more space-efficient data types.
  • Compress bulky BLOB and TEXT data.
• Move off of Amazon RDS, for instance to Amazon EC2 so you can manage your own storage.