With the digital universe set to reach 40 zettabytes by 2020,  the needless repetition involved in managing information silos individually, as has been done in the past, is becoming less and less acceptable for resource-strapped IT organizations already stretched thin. Yet so far, the world’s most popular open source database didn’t allow for centralized administration, leaving the burden of delivering that functionality on the ecosystem.

Oracle is now promising to change that with MySQL Fabric, a newly launched system designed to help practitioners rein in their instances and keep up with the accelerating growth of information within the enterprise.  To that end, the tool provides automated sharding, splitting databases into smaller and more manageable chunks that can be spread out across multiple servers instead of stored in one big box that would be far more difficult to scale.  Furthermore, shards can be moved and split at will, which allows for additional flexibility that can quickly add up in large deployments.

Even more important than operational agility is reliability, which MySQL Fabric addresses with a failover feature that kicks in immediately after the master server goes down and selects one of the slave instances for promotion. Transactions are automatically routed to the current master, which avoids the need to make any configuration changes at the application layer in the event of an outage. That not only serves to lower administrative overhead but also accelerates recovery,  reducing the impact on end-users.

In a move entirely uncharacteristic of Oracle, it has opted to release the tool under an open source license as part of the MySQL Utilities package rather than as a commercial offering. That suggests the database maker is finally starting to pay attention to the tremendous success arch-nemesis Red Hat has been having with its community-focused strategy.

The Linux distributor most recently contributed the source code for its ManageIQ cloud management solution (which, just as is the case with Oracle and MySQL, it obtained through an acquisition) to the OpenStack Foundation. Perhaps not coincidentally, the initiative has also seen increased participation from Larry Ellison’s firm lately: earlier this month, it unveiled a homegrown distribution of the open cloud platform that runs on the latest versions Oracle VM and Oracle Linux. The product is currently in technology preview.