MySQL Handles Heavy Load in SS8 Network's LNP Solution

If we all had to learn, list and communicate a new telephone number every time we switched to a different phone company, most of us would be reluctant to ever change - and this would be a huge roadblock to healthy competition among telephone carriers. This is why the United States and many other international markets have a government mandate specifying that all phone carriers must provide Local Number Portability (LNP), which allows users to retain their phone number when moving to another location in the same local calling area.

SS8 Networks, an IP signaling and services provider, recently introduced the industry's first fully IP-based LNP product, enabling phone carriers to satisfy government regulations without the need for expensive and proprietary circuit-switched technology. A critical piece of the SS8 LNP solution is its database, which must manage all the names of people -- up to 50 million records -- who have switched carriers, with corresponding tracking information. SS8 Networks selected MySQL as the database of choice to play this important role.

"After looking at several open source and proprietary databases, we concluded that MySQL very well fits our needs: a database engine that is not resource hungry, is fast, reliable, and has a very good price/performance ratio," said Zoran Milojevic, the LNP lead architect at SS8.

SS8 is using the MySQL database server as a persistent storage solution for their LNP database recovery and management purposes. The actual database serving traffic is a custom-made distributed in-memory table that is replicated from the MySQL tables on boot time, and later kept synchronized using a proprietary messaging protocol.

"We have been very pleased with MySQL's performance," continued Milojevic. "Keeping up with the database updates being pushed from the master LNP database on the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC), is a substantial job, and MySQL has performed even better than we had anticipated. We will definitely consider MySQL for future SS8 projects."