We’re delighted to be able to share that Tungsten Clustering – our flagship product – is named in the DBTA 2020 List of Trend Setting Products!

Congratulations to all the products and their teams that were named in the 2020 list.

We have been at the forefront of the market need since 2004 with our solutions for platform agnostic, highly available, globally scaling, clustered MySQL databases that are driving businesses to the cloud (whether hybrid or not) today; and our software solutions are the expression of that.

Tungsten Clustering allows enterprises running business-critical MySQL database applications to cost-effectively …

Overview

Over the past few days we have been working with a number of customers on the best way to handle Triggers within their MySQL environment when combined with Tungsten Replicator. We looked at situations where Tungsten Replicator was either part of a Tungsten Clustering installation or a standalone replication pipeline.

This blog dives head first into the minefield of Triggers and Replication.

Summary and Recommendations

The conclusion was that there is no easy one-answer-fits-all solution – It really depends on the complexity of your environment and the amount of flexibility you have in being able to adjust. Our top level summary and recommendations are as follows:

If using Tungsten Clustering and you need to use Triggers:

• Switch to …

Geo-scale MySQL – or how to build a global, multi-region MySQL cloud back-end capable of serving several hundred million player accounts

This blog introduces a series of blogs we’ll be publishing over the next few months that discuss a number of different customer use cases that our solutions support and that centre around achieving continuous MySQL operations with commercial-grade high availability (HA), geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR) and global scaling.

This first use case looks at a customer of ours who are a global gaming company with several hundred million world-wide player accounts.

What is the challenge?

How to reliably, and fast, cater to hundreds of millions of game players around the world? The challenge here is to serve a game application for a geographically-distributed audience; in other words, a pretty unique challenge.

It requires fast, local response times …

Overview The Skinny

In this blog post we explore various options for performance tuning MySQL server for better slave replication performance.

A Tungsten Cluster relies upon the Tungsten Replicator to move events from the master node to the slaves. Once the event has been transferred to the slave as THL on disk, the slave applier will then attempt to write it to the database. The Replicator can only apply events as fast as MySQL allows. If the MySQL server is somehow slow or blocking, then the Replicator will be as well.

A properly-tuned database server in addition to infrastructure and SysAdmin best practices will go quite a long way towards high-performance slave apply.

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

During one of our load tests, we had a peak of 60k writes/min, averaging …

We’re happy to announce that our white paper ‘Tungsten Clustering – Benefits & Configurations’ for MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server is available to read on our website.

Tungsten Clustering is a one-of-a-kind software solution that provides clustering, disaster recovery and high availability for MySQL, MariaDB & Percona Server databases.

It allows enterprises running business-critical database applications to cost-effectively achieve continuous operations on a global scale with:

• Commercial-grade high availability (HA)
• Geographically redundant disaster recovery (DR)
• Global operations with geographically distributed multi-master

…

Overview The Skinny

In this blog post, we explore the correct way to implement bi-directional Tungsten Replication between AWS Aurora and Tungsten Clustering for MySQL databases.

Background The Story

When we are approached by a prospect interested in using our solutions, we are proud of our pre-sales process by which that we engage at a very deep technical level to ensure the we provide the best possible solution to meet with the prospect’s requirements. This involves an in-depth hands-on POC, in addition to the significant time and effort we spend building and testing the solution architectures in our lab environment as part of the proposal process.

From time to time, we are presented with requirements that are not always quite so straight forward. Just recently we faced such a situation. A …

Overview The Skinny

Part of the power of Tungsten Clustering for MySQL / MariaDB is the ability to perform true zero-downtime maintenance, allowing client applications full access to the database layer, while taking out individual nodes for maintenance and upgrades. In this blog post we cover various types of maintenance scenarios, the best practices associated with each type of action, and the key steps to ensure the highest availability.

Important Questions Understand the Environment as a Whole First

There are a number of questions to ask when planning cluster maintenance that are critical to understand before starting.

For example:

1. What is the cluster topology?
   • Standalone (connectors write to single cluster master)
     Single cluster: …

Overview The Skinny

Part of the power of Tungsten Clustering for MySQL / MariaDB is its intelligent MySQL Proxy, known as the Tungsten Connector. The Tungsten Connector has built-in read-write splitting capabilities, and it is also possible to configure different algorithms which select the appropriate slave (i.e. Round-Robin or Lowest-Latency).

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

How do we best share the load between read-only slaves? Currently, there appears to be an imbalance, with most of the read-only queries reaching just one slave. What may we do to improve this situation?

This customer noticed that a couple of long …

The Replicator is a critical piece of the Tungsten Clustering solution for MySQL / MariaDB, as well as its own stand-alone data replication product. Automatic recovery is a feature that enables the Replicator to go back online in the event of a transient failure. In this blog we discuss how to enable Automatic Recovery. For more information about Auto-Recovery, please click here to visit the online documentation page.

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

We see that the replicators receive a transaction which has a deadlock error in it:

pendingError : Event application failed: seqno=82880882 fragno=0 message=java.sql.SQLTransactionRollbackException: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction

If one performs a service online, it comes back online without issue and continues …

Overview The Skinny

Database Proxies provide a single entry point into MySQL for the calling client applications.

Proxies are wonderful tools to handle various situations like a master role switch to another node for maintenance, or for transparency with read and write connections.

However, when the time comes to perform the switch action, all of the calling clients have been funneled through the proxy, so identification of the calling host from the database itself becomes difficult.

The Problem What is going on?

Let’s illustrate how not knowing the source of a client connection can be an issue for the database administrator…

In the following diagram, three client applications connect to a Tungsten Cluster via the Connector proxy:

…