MySQL Cluster 7.2 GA Released, Delivers 1 Billion Queries per Minute

I'm a novice in this area, so looking past the somewhat sensationalist headline (or, perhaps, I'm missing the wit? "Now with 70x more performance!")...

Can someone who knows this stuff give a bit of an overview on the significance of this release?

I read the NoSQL stuff as Oracle/MySQL trying to compete (at least in terms of marketing-speak) with the wave of competition that's arrived in the DB market. Is there any meat to it?

I'm also very curious to hear real world feedback on this, I've been aware of the option for a while, but never heard much about actual use.

Automatic sharding and memcached integration are pretty awesome features, and could definitely ease code at the application level (sharding code is a particularly special pain in the ass, not so much getting it working, but allowing for re-sharding migrations if you decide you need more shards, especially trying to do so without downtime which involves all sorts of nasty tradeoffs).

But bang-for-the-buck and reliability wise, I'm still unsure, I've heard very little about this in the wild. Is this more suited for high write v. read ratio situations, or is it aiming more at the Vertica/Greenplum big-data uses, or something else?

I did try around the time it split from the normal releases (6.0?). The overall feeling I got was that lots of simple things don't work, trivial bugs stay open for... well mine are still open and there was next to no documentation for any kind of troubleshooting. NDB returned error numbers which were not properly translated by mysql_error, so you were left looking them up the hard way. There was also next to no community - just one IRC channel where guru ndb hackers seemed to know everything about it... but any kind of debugging through them was pretty hard if you ended up with a "I've got a XXGB db which just doesn't come up, what do I do?" situation.

If this has improved lately, I'd be very interested to hear about the changes!

Yeah, that was pretty much exactly my experience last time I tried it. (Around version 7.1 / mid-2010, I think.)