"We are proud that MySQL is established as the 'de facto' database for modern online applications -- for both large and small Web properties," said Zack Urlocker, MySQL AB’s executive vice president of products. "While many of the world’s largest Internet-based companies rely upon MySQL, our database is also helping innumerable start-ups handle their explosive growth to reach their business goals."

Launched in 2006, Flixster has quickly become one of the Web’s most popular movie ratings sites, with over 15 million monthly unique visitors and over 1 billion movie ratings. Today, Flixster is one of the world's top 500 Web sites, and its traffic continues to increase every day. Flixster uses the MySQL database to store, manage and analyze all of the company's rapidly growing user traffic and movie information.

"We knew we wanted to build Flixster on open source technologies," said Saran Chari, chief technical officer at Flixster. "Proprietary databases were absolutely out of the question, both from a cost and management perspective. MySQL had already established itself as the leader in the open source database world, and with several of the largest Web sites running on MySQL, we were confident that we were making the right choice."

Flixster started with one MySQL server and "scaled-out" with more servers as their query load, traffic and user base has grown. Today, Flixster's Web application runs on 21 different MySQL servers supporting approximately 1.5 terabytes of data.

Scale-Out is a modern computing architecture that enables organizations to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware.

"MySQL’s easy replication has been one of the biggest benefits for us, and we will continue to scale out our database infrastructure to meet the ever increasing demands of our user base," continued Chari. "MySQL's ease-of-use enables our developers to set up and manage their own MySQL instances during development, which further accelerates our system efficiency. In addition, MySQL's technical support is a great value -- we always have an expert to turn to with questions."

NowPublic, one of the fastest growing "citizen" news organizations, has relied on MySQL to power its growth into the new media marketplace. By establishing a scale-out architecture with MySQL on low-cost commodity hardware, NowPublic has managed their growth to more than 132,600 contributors in 5,350 cities.

"We selected MySQL for its performance, reliability and scalability," noted Michael Meyers, NowPublic's chief technical officer. "We are especially happy with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor that provides views of our current environment and best practice advisors to quickly pinpoint bottlenecks in configuration or performance.”

For more information on scale-out, including customer success stories and Scale-Out whitepapers, please go to http://www.mysql.com/scaleout.

About MySQL

MySQL AB develops and supports a family of high-performance, affordable database products. The company’s flagship offering is 'MySQL Enterprise’, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube and Zappos.com.

With headquarters in the United States and Sweden -- and operations around the world -- MySQL AB supports both open source values and corporate customers' needs. For more information about MySQL, please visit www.mysql.com.