MySQL's High Availability Works for Red One Aviation

Red One Aviation is a St. Louis, Missouri, based company, providing flight information and aviation related data, to airports, pilots, corporate flight departments and other aviation companies. Red One must manage both real-time and historical data, pertaining to almost every flight in North America. This can mean processing approximately 70,000 flights in a 24-hour period, which at peak times relates to more than one take-off and landing every second!

All this information must be available online and accessible via user queries, both internally and via the Red One Web site. To achieve this, Red One required an extremely robust database, which could handle 24 X 7 continuous high volume updates, with little or no downtime. Due to the limited resources of the company, it also needed to be fairly straightforward in terms of installation, upgrading, and ongoing support and maintenance. Seamless integration with the Web server was also essential. It was also a requirement for the complete system to be operated in a “lights out” environment, with remote support only.

"We started evaluating Oracle and Microsoft products, but after comparing speeds, cost, and support, it soon became evident that MySQL was the logical path to take," said Roger Holden, President and CEO of Red One Aviation.

The Red One system architecture consists of Compaq Proliant DL380 rack servers, running MySQL 3.23 and SuSE Linux, together with Apache 1.3 and the Apache Tomcat Java application server. The programs and queries are all written in Java and Perl. The database is stored on RAID 5 SCSI drives, and is backed up daily. The system also interfaces to a Web-based GIS system, which displays real-time data on various maps.

The MySQL database consists of around 30 tables, and table growth is around 60,000 records per day. The total number of records at the end of 2002 was approximately 6 million, with data archived regularly. Indexed searches on this data via a Web query typically return in less than a quarter of a second. Other than planned downtimes, MySQL has been running continuously since initial installation in July 2002, in a mainly unattended environment. The only downtimes were planned maintenance and an unavoidable power outage. Most support, albeit minimal, is done remotely, and Red One is using the MySQL Control Center on Windows based PCs, for remote administration.

Red One replicates the MySQL database on a separate server for back-up purposes, with MySQL running on a separate machine as a slave system. “The configuration was very straightforward (in fact took a few minutes!), and works well. We are very pleased with the replication functionality,” said Holden.

Holden added, “The MySQL database has never failed or stopped, or even given any error situation ever in the same period. Even coming from an IT background of over 20 years, I find this quite remarkable, and it reinforces all my decisions to choose MySQL for high-availability. The MySQL servers have been locked in a room 1,000 miles away and have only been physically visited three times this year!”

Contact Information:
Roger Holden
rogerh@red1aviation.com