The Twelve Days of Scale-Out: The Phone House Consolidates its eCommerce Systems on MySQL Enterprise

Online Shop, Content Management System and Customer Administration Now Run on Open Source Database

MUNICH -- June 17, 2007 -- MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced that The Phone House Telecom, a German provider of communication and entertainment services, has done an extensive consolidation of the infrastructure of its online shop -- replacing systems from Oracle and Informix with the MySQL Enterprise database.

Thomas Hutters, director of The Phone House's data processing center, is very satisfied with the unified new applications. Due to MySQL’s speed and ability to easily "Scale-Out" on low-cost hardware, standardizing on MySQL Enterprise has helped the company be more flexible as it prepares for a growing number of users on its online shop.

"The high scalability and the attractive cost-performance ratio of MySQL are decisive in ensuring that our applications can keep pace with the growing volume of data," Hutters said.

Prior to the consolidation, it was difficult for the company to maintain its heterogeneous systems. The Phone House's online shop, content management and online billing were distributed on different systems running Informix and Oracle databases. The company decided to build a completely new, uniform system.

The decision to select MySQL Enterprise was easy for the IT staff because they had been using MySQL for the past seven years for a number of customized database applications that had never failed.

"We consider the MySQL Enterprise Server a good and mature product -- and MySQL Enterprise's monitoring and advisory services a useful aid," said Andreas Sassermann, director of technology at The Phone House.

For security and load distribution, The Phone House uses MySQL replication with a master database server and two replicated servers. The distribution of requests is achieved through self-regulation in the software. There are 547 tables in the databases with a data volume of 65 gigabytes. On average, each server handles about 1,000 queries per second.

MySQL's 'Twelve Days of Scale-Out'

Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site will be highlighting how many of the world’s fastest-growing companies -- such as The Phone House -- are using MySQL database technology to cost-effectively Scale-Out their successful online businesses.

The campaign is live at www.mysql.com/scaleout.

What is Scale-Out?

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. This is in contrast to a ‘Scale-Up’ approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.

On June 20, MySQL will be hosting a special worldwide Webinar titled, “Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses”. To register for this event, please visit www.mysql.com/scaleoutwebinar.

About the Phone House

The Phone House, headquartered in Münster, Germany, is a wholly owned subsidiary of London-based The Carphone Warehouse plc, the world's largest independent mobile telephone carrier. The Phone House offers the German market a full range of communication and entertainment solutions, encompassing cellular, fixed network, DSL and multimedia telephony. The Phone House offers their customers products from all the major telecommunication brands under one roof. The company has more than 850 employees and more than 1.5 million customers.

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, with over 11 million active installations. 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 and YouTube.

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

###

MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the USA and other countries. Other products or company names mentioned may be the trademarks of their respective corporations.