Converting Mysql to mysql cluster

Question

My site is using mysql and PHP, now for the scale purpose want to introduce mysql-cluster. Few questions are -
1. Do I need to change any code which is written in PHP.
2. What are the steps to convert mysql to mysql-cluster.

Appreciate the help.

Answer 1

1) The answer is "yes and no". There's a good chance that your application will work fine with MySQL Cluster without any changes *but* there are a few gotchas such as:

 - the current GA version of MySQL Cluster (7.2) doesn't implement Foreign Keys (coming in Cluster 7.3)
 - (ignoring BLOBs) rows cannot be larger than 13 Kb
 - no geo-spatial indexes
 - no full-text search

A good place to get more information is
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql-cluster-evaluation-guide/

That guide also gives you some advice on scenarios where you *shouldn't* use MySQL Cluster.

In addition, as you should expect, to get the best performance out of MySQL Cluster you may want to tweak your schema and/or application. You can get lots of tips from

http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/guide-to-optimizing-performance-of-the-mysql-cluster/

2) Basically, you need to backup your database (mysqldump), load it into a MySQL Server that's part of your Cluster (use http://www.clusterdb.com/mysql-cluster/auto-installer-labs-release/) to get your first Cluster up and running and then issue ALTER TABLE ENGINE=ndb;