Mar 28, 2010

New Tungsten Software Releases for MySQL and PostgreSQL

I would like to announce a couple of new Tungsten versions available for your database clustering enjoyment.  As most readers of this blog are aware, Tungsten allows users to create highly available data services that include replicated copies, distributed management, and application connectivity using unaltered open source databases.   We are continually improving the software and have a raft of new features coming out this year.  

First, there is a new Tungsten 1.2.3 maintenance release available in both commercial as well as open source editions.  You can get access to the commercial version on the Continuent website, while the open source version is available on SourceForge

 The Tungsten 1.2.3 release focuses on improvements for MySQL users including the following:
  • Transparent session consistency for multi-tenant applications.  This allows applications that follow some simple conventions like sharding tenant data by database to get automatic read scaling to slaves without making code changes.
  • A greatly improved script for purging history on Tungsten Replicator. 
  • Fixes to binlog extraction to handle enum and set data types correctly. 
By far the biggest improvement in this release is Tungsten product documentation, including major rewrites for the guides covering management and connectivity.  Even the Release Notes are better.  If you want to find out how Tungsten works, start with the new Tungsten Concepts and Administration Guide

Second, there's a new Tungsten 1.3 release coming out soon.  Commercial versions are already in use at selected customer sites, and you can build the open source version by downloading code from SVN on SourceForge

The Tungsten 1.3 release sports major feature additions in the following areas: 
  • A new replicator architecture that allows you to manage non-Tungsten replication and also to configure very flexible replication flows to use multi-core systems more effectively and implement complex replication topologies.  The core processing loop for replication can now cycle through 700,000 events per second on my laptop--it's really quick. 
  • Much improved support for PostgreSQL warm standby clustering as well as provisional management of new PostgreSQL 9 features like streaming replication and hot standby.  
  • Replication support for just about everything in the MySQL binlog:  large transactions, unsigned characters, session variables, various permutations of character sets and binary data, and ability to download binlog files through the MySQL client protocol.  If you can put it in the binlog we can replicate it.  
We also have provisional support for Drizzle thanks to Markus Ericsson, plus a raft of other improvements.  This has been a huge amount of work all around, so I hope you'll enjoy the results.

P.s., Contact Continuent if you want to be a beta test site for Tungsten 1.3. 

Mar 22, 2010

Replication and More Replication at 2010 MySQL Conference

Database replication is still interesting after all these years.  Two of my talks focused on replication technology were accepted for the upcoming MySQL 2010 Conference.  Here are the summaries.
The first talk is a solo presentation covering Tungsten, which creates highly available and scalable database clusters using vanilla MySQL databases linked by flexible replication.  I'll describe how it works and some cool things you can do like zero-downtime upgrades and session-based performance scaling.   If you want to know how Tungsten can help you, this is a good time to find out.

The second talk is a joint effort with Jay Pipes covering issues like big data that are driving replication technology and the solutions to these problems available to MySQL users.  We'll lay out our vision of where things are going to try to help you pick the right technology for your next project.   Jay and I are also soliciting input on this talk from the Drizzle community among others.  If you are interested check out the thread on drizzle-discuss or post to this blog.

Finally, I'll be around for much of the MySQL conference, so if you are interested in Tungsten or data replication in general or just want to hang out, please look me up.   See you in Santa Clara!

Tungsten and PostgreSQL 9 at PG-East Conference

My Continuent colleagues Linas Virbalas and Alex Alexander will be giving a talk entitled Building Tungsten Clusters with PostgreSQL Hot Standby and Streaming Replication later this week at the PG-East Conference in Philadelphia.   I saw the demo last week and it's quite impressive.  You can flip the master and slaves for maintenance, open slaves for reads, failover automatically, etc.  It's definitely worth attending if you are in Philly this week.

Looking beyond the conference, we plan to be ready to support Tungsten clusters on PostgreSQL 9 as soon as it goes production.   Everything we have seen so far indicates that the new log streaming and hot standby features are going to be real hits.  They not only help applications, but from a clustering perspective queryable slaves with minimal replication lag are also a lot easier to manage.  Alex and Linas will have more to say about that during their presentation. 

Meanwhile, I'm sorry to miss the PG-East conference but wish everyone who will be attending a great time.  See you later this year at PG-West!