I received many request about MySQL High Availability Architecture. There are a lot of tools, but how can we use them to achieve MySQL HA without over engineering everything.

To answer such demand, there is no generic architecture, of course there are leaders in solutions, but put them together can result in many different designs, I will start a series of article on that topic. Feel free, as usual to comment, but also recommend other tools that could be used in a future post.

So today’s post is related to MySQL InnoDB Cluster with Hashicorp’s Consul.

Architecture

This is the overview of the deployed architecture:

As you can see, we have 3 data centers, but in fact we have only two DCs on premises and one in the cloud. A large amount of request are always …

High availability for MySQL has become increasingly relevant given the ever increasing rate of adoption and implementation. It’s no secret to anyone in the community that the popularity of MySQL has become noteworthy. I still remember my start with MySQL in the early 5.0 days and people told me that I may not want to consider wasting my time training on a database that didn’t have a large industry adoption, but look at where we are now! One of my favorite pages to cite when trying to exhibit this fact is the db-engines.com ranking trend page where we can see that MySQL is right up there and contending with enterprise products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

MySQL has gone from being part of the ever famous LAMP stack for users looking to set up their first website to seeing adoption from major technical players such as …

In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the MySQL high availability solution options.

In the previous post of this series, we looked at the MySQL high availability (HA) solutions that have been around for a long time. I called these solutions “the elders.” Some of these solutions (like replication) are heavily used today and have been improved from release to release of MySQL.

This post focuses on the MySQL high availability solutions that have appeared over the last five years and gained a fair amount of traction in the community. I chose to include this group only two solutions: Galera and RDS Aurora. I’ll use the term “Galera” generically: it covers Galera Cluster, MariaDB Cluster and Percona …

In this blog, we’ll look at different MySQL high availability options.

The dynamic MySQL ecosystem is rapidly evolving many technologies built around MySQL. This is especially true for the technologies involved with the high availability (HA) aspects of MySQL. When I joined Percona back in 2009, some of these HA technologies were very popular – but have since been almost forgotten. During the same interval, new technologies have emerged. In order to give some perspective to the reader, and hopefully help to make better choices, I’ll review the MySQL HA landscape as it is in 2017. This review will be in three parts. The first part (this post) will cover the technologies that have been around for a long time: the elders. The second part will focus on the technologies that are very popular today: the adults. Finally, the last part will try to extrapolate which technologies could become popular in the upcoming years: the …

MySQL InnoDB Cluster (or only Group Replication) becomes more and more popular. This solution doesn’t attract only experts anymore. On social medias, forums and other discussions, people are asking me what it the best way to migrate a running environment using traditional asynchronous replication [Master -> Slave(s)] to InnoDB Cluster.

The following procedure is what I’m actually recommending. These steps have for objective to reduce the downtime to the minimum for the database service.

We can divide the procedure in 9 steps:

1. the current situation
2. preparing the future cluster
3. data transfert
4. replication from current system
5. creation of the cluster with a single instance
6. adding instances to the cluster
7. configure the router
8. test phase
9. pointing the application to the new solution

…

A few weeks ago I started experimenting with MySQL InnoDB cluster. As part of the testing, I tried to kill a node to see what happens to the cluster.

The good news is that the cluster is resilient. When the primary node goes missing, the cluster replaces it immediately, and operations continue. This is one of the features of an High Availability system, but this feature alone does not define the usefulness or the robustness of the system. In one of my previous jobs, I worked at testing a commercial HA system and I've learned a few things about what makes a reliable system.

Armed with this knowledge, I did some more experiments with InnoDB Cluster. The attempt from my previous article had no other expectation than seeing operations continue with ease (primary node …

Today I presented MySQL InnoDB Cluster at the Helsinki MySQL User Group.

To demonstrate how easy it’s to deploy a cluster with MySQL Shell and used the prompt that will be part of a future release just because it’s beautiful.

If you also want to see how it looks like, just check the video below:

There were several MongoDB users in the audience and I got only very positive feedback, they were very surprised how easy it’s to deploy a MySQL InnoDB Cluster these days !

InnoDB Cluster was released as GA a few weeks ago. I remember the initial announcement of the product at OOW 2016, promising a seamless solution for replication and high availability with great ease of use. I was a bit disappointed to see that, at GA release time, the InnoDB Cluster is a patchwork of three separate products (Group Replication, MySQL Router, MySQL Shell) which the users have to collect and install separately.

Given this situation, I was very pleased when Matthew Lord published Docker-InnoDB-Cluster, an image for Docker that contains everything you need to get the system up and running. The …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to achieve better-than-linear scaling.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. For example, we consider a system scalable if it is capable of increasing its total output under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability.

It is often accepted as a fact that systems (in particular databases) can’t scale better than linearly. By this I mean when you double resources, the expected performance doubles, at best (and often is less than doubled).  

We can attribute this assumption to Amdahl’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), and later …

ProxySQL is the leader in proxy and load balancing solution for MySQL. It has great features like query caching, multiplexing, mirroring, read/write splitting, routing, etc… The latest enhancement in ProxySQL is the native support of MySQL Group Replication. No more need to use an external script within the scheduler like I explained in this previous post.

This implementation supports Groups in Single-Primary and in Multi-Primary mode. It is even possible to setup a Multi-Primary Group but dedicate writes on only one member.

René, the main developer of ProxySQL, went even further. For example in a 7 nodes clusters (Group …