“unprecedented”, “difficult”, “challenging”, “current situation” – are just some of the most commonly heard words to describe what is going on in the world right now and it’s fair to say there probably isn’t any other way to describe it.

Continuent has been a fully remote working company since its inception, and I have been part of the team for coming up to 5 years, so for me, the usual Monday to Friday “9-to-5” feeling is no different; but for those facing this for the first time, it can present challenges and a change of approach to how you work.

In this blog I want to cover a few of the approaches I found that made the transition easier for me, but also look at the technical side and what we at Continuent use to conduct our day to day business and Keep the Lights on.

Work at home or home at work?

The single most important thing when working from home is ensuring you …

In this blog post, we talk about the basic function and features of the Tungsten Connector.

The Tungsten Connector is an intelligent MySQL proxy that provides key high-availability and read-scaling features. This includes the ability to route MySQL queries by inspecting them in-flight.

Connector Basics Understanding the Two Key Features

The most important function of the Connector is failover handling. When the cluster detects a failed master because the MySQL server port is no longer reachable, the Connectors are signaled and traffic is re-routed to the newly-elected Master node.

Next is the ability to route MySQL read-only queries to a slave (or the master, if no slave is …

Our team has continued to pave the way for Continuous MySQL Operations this year with our Continuent Tungsten products: Tungsten Clustering and Tungsten Replicator.

And we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all – our customers, partners, followers and colleagues – for your support in 2019, and celebrate some of our successes with you…

2019 Continuent Momentum Highlights

• Launched three new Tungsten Clustering & Tungsten Replicator releases
• Introduced the new Tungsten Replicator (AMI) on the Amazon Marketplace
• Were named a 2020 Top Trending Product by Database Trends & Applications Magazine

2019 Continuent Customer Highlights

• 100%: Customer Satisfaction during the most recent customer survey
• 97.5%: our …

We are honored to be ranked as one of the 10 fastest growing AWS solution providers to watch in the year 2018 by The Technology Headlines.

Read about our journey, the host of benefits for our customers, our exceptional team, and future roadmap in this Amazon Special Edition.

In this blog post, we talk about how to run applications across multiple clouds (i.e. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) using Continuent Clustering. You want your business-critical applications to withstand node, datacenter, availability-zone or regional failures. For SaaS apps, you also want to bring data close to your application users for faster response times and a better user experience. With cross-cloud capability, Continuent also helps avoid lock-in to any particular cloud provider.

The key to success for the database layer is to be available and respond rapidly.

From both a business and operational perspective, spreading the application across cloud environments from different vendors provides significant protection against vendor-specific outages and vendor lock-in. Running on multiple platforms provides greater …

Did you know that Continuent Clustering supports having clusters at multiple sites world-wide with either active-active or active-passive replication meshing them together?

Not only that, but we support a flexible hybrid model that allows for a blended architecture using any combination of node types. So mix-and-match your highly available database layer on bare metal, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, etc.

In this article we will discuss using the Active/Passive model to scale reads worldwide.

The model is simple: select one site as the Primary where all writes will happen. The rest of the sites will pull events as quickly as possible over the WAN and make the data available to all local clients. This means your application gets the best of both worlds:

• Simple deployment with no application changes needed. All writes …

In this blog post, we demonstrate how to convert a single standalone cluster into a Composite Primary/DR topology running in two data centers.

Our example starting cluster has 5 nodes (1 master and 4 slaves) and uses service name alpha. Our target cluster will have 6 nodes (3 per cluster) in 2 member clusters alpha_east and alpha_west in composite service alpha.

This means that we will reuse the existing service name alpha as the name of the new composite service, and create two new service names, one for each cluster (alpha_east and alpha_west).

Below is an INI file extract example for our starting standalone cluster with 5 nodes:

[defaults]
...

[alpha]
connectors=db1,db2,db3,db4,db5
master=db1
members=db1,db2,db3,db4,db5
topology=clustered

To convert the above configuration to a Composite Primary/DR:

1. First you must stop all services on all existing nodes:

   shell> stopall
   

   …

In this blog post, we talk about what happened during an installation of the Tungsten Cluster into an environment with SELinux running and mis-configured.

An attempt to execute `tpm install` on v5.3.2 recently failed with the below error:

ERROR >> node3_production_customer_com >> Unable to run 'sudo systemctl status mysqld.service' or the database server is not running (DatasourceBootScriptCheck) 
Update the /etc/sudoers file or disable sudo by adding --enable-sudo-access=false 

Worse, this customer reported that this appeared as a WARNING only in Dev and Staging tests. So we checked, and it seemed we were able to access systemctl properly:

shell> sudo systemctl status mysqld.service
● mysqld.service - MySQL Percona Server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/mysqld.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: activating (start-post) since Tue 2018-06-19 17:46:19 BST; 1min 15s ago …

In this blog post, we talk about how to configure automatic start at boot time for the Tungsten Clustering components.

By default, Tungsten Clustering does not start automatically on boot. To enable Tungsten Clustering to start at boot time, use the deployall script provided to create the necessary boot scripts:

shell> sudo /opt/continuent/tungsten/cluster-home/bin/deployall

To disable automatic startup at boot time, use the undeployall command:

shell> sudo /opt/continuent/tungsten/cluster-home/bin/undeployall

For Multisite/Multimaster deployments in specific, there are separate cross-site replicators running. In this case, a custom startup script must be created, otherwise the replicator will be unable to start as it has been configured in a different directory.

1. Create a link from the Tungsten Replicator service startup script in the operating system …

In this blog post, we talk about the Automatic Reconnect feature in the Tungsten Connector.

Automatic reconnect enables the Connector to re-establish a connection in the event of a transient failure. Under specific circumstances, the Connector will also retry the query.

Connector automatic reconnect is enabled by default in Proxy and Smartscale modes.

Use the following tpm command option on the command line (remove the leading hyphens inside INI files):

--connector-autoreconnect=false

to disable automatic reconnect.

This feature is not available while running in Bridge Mode. Use the tpm command option --connector-bridge-mode=false to disable Bridge mode.

Automatic reconnect enables retries of statements under the following circumstances:

• not in bridge mode
• not inside a transaction
• no temp table has been created
…