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This blog is the first blog in a new series about Tungsten’s QA (Quality Assurance). Continuent Tungsten is a clustering and replication solution for MySQL and MariaDB, used by some of the largest MySQL estates to achieve continuous MySQL operations and uptime; why? Besides the stellar support team, and fully-integrated components, customers say: “Stability,” and, “It just works.”

This blog is about troubleshooting failed DDL across all Replicas in a composite active/active (CAA) Tungsten Cluster. The issue was resolved by setting a more permissive SQL_MODE, then locating and cleaning the bad data with proper NULLs before re-issuing the ALTER TABLE.

Welcome to the wonderful world of open source! You really are on your own, even if you think you acquire a solution that works. But many of the companies offering solutions based on open source components wrapped with expensive consulting engagements really can’t help you as they are not the original developers of some of the important core components, thus they do not have the necessary skills to fix them either.Welcome to the wonderful world of open source! You really are on your own, even if you think you acquire a solution that works. But many of the companies offering solutions based on open source components wrapped with expensive consulting engagements really can’t help you as they are not the original developers of some of the important core components, thus they do not have the necessary skills to fix them either.

Instead of contributing back to the original project, and in that way benefitting the project as a whole, Percona takes over smaller open-source projects (such as Galera) and larger open source projects (MySQL, MongoDB), then adds some small enhancements (especially when compared to the work done by the original developers), slaps its own name on it and proceeds to make some negative comments against those who have done the hardest work.

There are two key elements (which often separate us from many other open source operators, such as Percona) to our MySQL HA/DR and Continuous Operations solutions. Read this blog, adapted from the June “Word from the CEO” from the Continuent Newsletter to find out what distinguishes Continuent’s Tungsten Clustering solution in the open source MySQL database industry.

We often hear that asynchronous replication creates a possible data loss window, thus it is not an acceptable solution for certain types of applications.

Yes, this is true. In theory, that is. 

In practice, we have developed the Tungsten Cluster solution to the point that it really does not happen in real life. Please read this blog to understand why not!

SmartScale is a special mode of the Tungsten Connector (aka Tungsten Proxy), which allows read requests to be intelligently routed to either a replica or the primary to ensure that the data returned is not stale. This feature is available when the Connector is running in the application-layer Proxy mode. Learn more about the behavior of SmartScale in this blog.

Application performance and MySQL database responsiveness is always high priority for highly-available, business-critical use cases. That’s why Tungsten Clustering offers features and options to tune for maximum performance, such as Parallel Apply. When does Parallel Apply work best? What are the limitations? To find out, read this blog from MySQL industry vet, Eric M. Stone, the COO of Continuent!

This blog is about open source MySQL clustering software, specifically Codership’s Galera Cluster and Percona’s fork of that, XtraDB Cluster. If you are considering using Galera, please use the original version, or please use the version by MariaDB, which is actively supporting the Galera team.

Upgrades are a normal, expected part of all software lifecycles, and Tungsten is no exception. Keep your software up-to-date to ensure compatibility, supportability and the lowest risk possible to your operation.

It goes without saying that database security is top priority at Continuent; Tungsten Clustering customers in financial and healthcare organizations among others implement the strictest standards of data security, and so we have always kept it a mandate to not only support HIPPA and PII compliance, and maintain strict boundaries and protocols in design of our software solution and when providing support.

Read about MySQL to MongoDB / MongoDB Atlas replication: what it’s all about, why it’s needed and how it works.