WebScaleSQL
Discontinued MySQL management system
WebScaleSQL was an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) created as a software branch of the production-ready community releases of MySQL. By joining efforts of a few companies and incorporating various changes and new features into MySQL, WebScaleSQL aimed toward fulfilling various needs arising from the deployment of MySQL in large-scale environments, which involve large amounts of data and numerous database servers.
The source code of WebScaleSQL is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
The project website announced in December 2016 that the companies involved would no longer contribute to the project.
Overview
Running MySQL on numerous servers with large amounts of data, at the scale of terabytes and petabytes of data, creates a set of difficulties that in many cases arise the need for implementing specific customized MySQL features, or the need for introducing functional changes to MySQL. More than a few companies have faced the same (or very similar) set of difficulties in their production environments, which used to result in the availability of multiple solutions for similar challenges.
WebScaleSQL was announced on March 27, 2014, as a joint effort of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter (with Alibaba Group joining in January 2015), aiming to provide a centralized development structure for extending MySQL with new features specific to its large-scale deployments, such as building large replicated databases running on server farms. As a result, WebScaleSQL attempted to open a path toward deduplicating the efforts each founding company had been putting into maintaining its own branch of MySQL, and toward bringing together more developers.
WebScaleSQL was created as a branch of the MySQL's latest production-ready community release, which was version 5.6 as of March 2013. As the project aimed to tightly follow new MySQL community releases, a branching path was selected instead of becoming a software fork of MySQL. The selection of MySQL production-ready community releases for the WebScaleSQL's upstream, instead of selecting some of the available MySQL forks was the result of a consensus between the four founding companies, which concluded that the features already existing in MySQL 5.6 are suitable for large-scale deployments, while additional features of the same kind are planned for MySQL 5.7.
Features
The initial changes and feature additions that WebScaleSQL introduced to the MySQL 5.6 codebase came from the engineers employed by the four founding companies; however, the project was open to peer-reviewed community contributions. As of September 15, 2014, available new features and changes included the following:
A software framework that provides automated testing of all proposed changes
A customized suite of database performance tests
Various changes to the automated tests provided by the MySQL community releases
Performance improvements in various areas, including buffer pool flushing, execution of certain types of SQL queries, and support for NUMA architectures
Changes related to large-scale deployments, such as the ability to specify sub-second client timeouts
Performance and reliability improvements to the global transaction identifier (GTID) feature of MySQL 5.6
So-called super_read_only operation mode for the MySQL server, which disables data modification operations even for privileged database accounts
As of March 28, 2014, planned new features and changes included the following:
New asynchronous MySQL client that will eliminate the client-side waiting while establishing database connections, sending queries, and receiving their results
Availability of various table, user and compression statistics
Changes to the internal compression mechanisms
Addition of a logical read-ahead mechanism that will bring significant performance improvements for full table scans
Availability
WebScaleSQL is distributed in a source-code-only form, with no official binaries available.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “WebScaleSQL” as discontinued MySQL management system. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as discontinued MySQL management system. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17089542. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2014, 2015 and 2013.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “WebScaleSQL”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow WebScaleSQL primary sources, WebScaleSQL archive and WebScaleSQL research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “WebScaleSQL”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “WebScaleSQL” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.