The Real Time Web is upon us. In blogs and elsewhere, millions of people are generating hundreds of millions of posts and billions of links describing what matters to them and sharing it with anyone who wishes to read or participate.

With this explosion of expression comes an equal explosion of data, meta-data, and relationships. The challenge is to scale the accumulation of data in real time while it is being queried for up-to-the-minute results and growing exponentially.

This talk will walk through some successful strategies for scaling, partitioning, configuring, replicating and monitoring an architecture backed by MySQL that delivers the goods.

Scaling:
A specific example of growing Technorati Tags from 0 to 50MM records in 9 months. From 1 server to 3 very different configurations based on application usage patterns and the strengths of MySQL.

Partitioning:
Knowing your application, your data access methods, write and queries rates is essential to designing the right partitioning schemes. When data sets grow too big, databases can grind to a halt. Splitting data up by various dimensions becomes the key to success.

MyISAM vs. InnoDB:
Different storage engines serve very different purposes. Know when and how to use them.

Replication:
MySQL replication is an essential tool to distribute query load and provide for redundancy.

Administration:
When you have 200+ instances of MySQL, you need to know if they're all happy.