The AP Relies on MySQL for Transaction-Heavy News Delivery System

The Associated Press (AP), the world's oldest and largest news agency with a global daily reach of 1 billion people, provides text, audio, video, news photos, graphics and technology to more than 15,000 media outlets around the world. The AP provides an innovative service called "AP Hosted News," which makes it easy for news providers to integrate AP hosted content into their Web sites. Created to meet the common information needs of many diverse media outlets, the AP Hosted News service reaches approximately 600 affiliate newspapers and broadcasters around the world. To support this level of activity, the AP is leveraging the MySQL® database to power AP Hosted News.

The AP relies on the MySQL database to serve up a massive amount of content, including the U.S. Census and Olympic results. With so many affiliate newspapers across the globe, speed and customization are key, and the MySQL database's performance and capacity to handle large volumes of data have met the stringent requirements of the AP.

"Due to the mission-critical nature of the AP Hosted News application, we had to be absolutely certain the database running the service was sufficiently powerful to meet the stress of hundreds of thousands of transactions each day," said Terry Ewing, senior systems manager, who is part of the technology team at AP that chose MySQL. "Initially, we were using an Informix database as the backbone of the AP Hosted News application, but when we redesigned the system from the ground up, we switched to MySQL, and it has been a great solution for us."

Running on Sun 420 servers with the Sun Solaris operating system, the AP Hosted News site is heavily trafficked, particularly on days during which a breaking news event is unfolding. For example, affiliate newspapers commonly divert more than 150,000 pages of content per day from their own Web site to AP Hosted News during an average news cycle, a number that can more than triple to as many as 500,000 pages per affiliate on a busy news day. Because affiliate news organizations rely so heavily on AP technology and content to retain reader loyalty, the underlying database in the AP Hosted News application must offer optimal performance and the ability to scale to support 11,000 concurrent users.

"Once the decision was made to move away from Informix, our team began a search for a more stable solution, which we assumed would come from another large proprietary database vendor," explained Ewing. "In the meantime, we put together a proof-of-concept model using MySQL to demonstrate what it was we were looking for. Almost immediately it became clear that our search was pointless: MySQL, with its free GPL license, was by far the best solution for our application."

MySQL has given the AP new flexibility to create quick Web-enabled database applications that relate to recent events, such as a casualties database for the Iraq war. Now, as big news stories break and more database resources are required, the AP simply loads MySQL onto available hardware without the strain of working around a specific proprietary license.

"MySQL has an ease of setup and deployment and a license that allows us to do what no big commercial database does - it gives us the flexibility to slap the database on a box and make it live without the encumbrances of licensing. This is a critical business requirement in these days of news-by-the-minute," noted Ewing.

Another key benefit of using MySQL for the AP is that it does not require the support of a full-time database administrator. Prior to deploying with MySQL, the AP IT team only had time to focus on existing technology issues, due to the amount of bandwidth required to maintain its previous system. Now the IT staff now has time to plan ahead and focus on other projects without worrying about the stability or availability of the AP Hosted News service. The AP team now spends its days focusing on new features rather than maintenance.

"The decision to use MySQL was easy because the system runs on its own," stated Ewing. "The key benefits of using the MySQL database are its performance, its stability and its low total cost of ownership. Bottom line: it just works."

For more information about MySQL at The Associated Press, please contact Terry Ewing at tewing@ap.org.