It's now about one year ago since we released MariaDB 5.5. That proved to be an important
release for MariaDB as it became popular with the users and
ultimately also has been adopted by several important Linux
distributions. But we have not stopped working since then, and
now the MariaDB project is happy to announce something new again:
the immediate availability of MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 stable release
(GA).
As soon as we had released MariaDB 5.5 stable, we started
planning with Codership Oy how to integrate their Galera
replication technology with MariaDB 5.5. We have then worked
together to merge their Write Set REPlication API into MariaDB,
and gone through a rigorous testing program with beta and RC
releases leading to today's a stable release.
Elena from Monty Program and people from the MariaDB user
community have tested those releases and provided feedback if
they have found any bugs. Seppo Jaakola from the Galera team is a
MariaDB Captain, which means he not only has commit rights to the
MariaDB trunk, he also can participate in the MariaDB decision
making together with other core contributors. (Note that MariaDB
Galera Cluster currently still has it's own branch in the MariaDB project on
Launchpad. But I think it is likely that in the future this
will become part of the main MariaDB branch and releases.)
This is one reason today's release makes me very happy, because
this is a great example of what we always wanted the MariaDB
project to become. It also shows how we operate with many other
companies and individuals. We want to be open and inclusive to
anyone who can contribute great code, so that MariaDB can
continue its MySQL heritage of being the most popular open source
database. We want MariaDB to always include all the great
innovation happening in the MySQL ecosystem.
About synchronous multi-master clusteringIn the past weeks I have
traveled in Germany, Korea and Sweden to speak about MariaDB, and
it is clear to me that a lot of people have already heard of
Galera and are already trying it out. But if you didn't yet know
about this technology, let me tell you why it is important.
MariaDB Galera Cluster provides synchronous multi-master
replication. A simple way to explain what this means is to
compare it with other alternatives that we have used for MariaDB
high availability until today:
If you compare it to the traditional master-slave replication, it
means that your data is safer in a Galera cluster because it is
replicated immediately as part of the commit, without any delay.
(This is why it is synchronous.) Also, in traditional
master-slave replication you can do read-only scale-out, but with
Galera you can read and write to any node. This makes life easier
for application developers, because you don't need to separate
read-only transactions and write transactions. (This is why it is
called multi-master.)
You can also compare it with DRBD, which is another
popular High Availability solution for MariaDB and MySQL. The
reason people use DRBD is usually because it is also synchronous
replication, only it happens on the disk driver level. So it is
used by people who want to be 100% sure they don't lose a single
transaction if they do a failover. But DRBD doesn't give you any
scale-out, since the spare node is so called cold standby,
so you cannot use it for anything else but disaster
recovery.
With MariaDB Galera Cluster we now provide "best of both worlds":
it is both synchronous, and you can use it for scale-out. And not
just read-only scale out but multi-master scale-out.
Automatic node provisioningThere are many
other benefits to Galera too, and you will be able to read more
about them on the MariaDB blog. One nice little feature I think is
also worth mentioning is the automatic node provisioning. One
reason MySQL master-slave replication has become so popular is
that it is quite easy to setup and understand. But Galera takes
this even further, they completely automate the node provisioning process.
My philosophy when I created MySQL was always to make everything
very easy to the user, and I'm happy to see Galera shares this
philosophy.
But it is not only nice, it is actually an important feature
especially if you run MariaDB in the cloud. In the cloud you can
save money by adding nodes to a cluster (scale out) when needed
and then removing them (scale in) when you need less performance.
You might do this every day, or every week depending on what kind
of traffic your website gets. But to add and remove MariaDB nodes
every day, you of course cannot do it manually every time.
For example many NoSQL systems talk about automatic node
provisioning in their marketing so that they will sound "cloud
compatible". But MariaDB Galera Cluster does it too, so there is
no reason to abandon SQL just to have automatic node
provisioning.
Commercial supportWhen you have tested MariaDB Galera Cluster and
decided that you like it, and want to run it in production, you
of course want to make sure you have proper support in place.
This is also important so that the developers can continue to
work on the project and make it even better. Codership operates
with a similar model like my company Monty Program, they
develop the technology and do bug fixes, and they partner with
SkySQL and
other companies that support MariaDB in order to provide a
complete and seamless support experience. You can contact SkySQL to discuss
commercial support for both MariaDB and MariaDB-Galera.
You can also support MariaDB Galera Cluster development directly
by donating via the MariaDB Foundation. If you
specifically want to support Galera development, you should
target your donation to "MariaDB Galera Cluster".
Mar
07
2013