This blog post was originally published in November 2017 and was updated in June 2023.

In this blog, we’ll provide a comparison between MariaDB vs. MySQL (including Percona Server for MySQL).

Introduction: MariaDB vs. MySQL

The goal of this blog post is to evaluate, at a higher level, MariaDB vs. MySQL vs. Percona Server for MySQL side-by-side to better inform the decision making process. It is largely an unofficial response to published comments from the MariaDB Corporation.

It is worth noting that Percona Server for MySQL is a drop-in compatible branch of MySQL, where Percona contributes as much as possible upstream. MariaDB Server, on the other hand, is a fork of MySQL 5.5. They cherry-picked MySQL features and don’t …

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 …

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 …

Why does the DIY approach fail to deliver vs. the Tungsten Clustering solution for geo-distributed MySQL multimaster deployments?

Before we dive into the 10 reasons, note why commercially-supported enterprise software is less risky and in fact less costly:

• The labor time spent building and maintaining a DIY solution costs more than a supported solution that just works.
• There is documentation, training, support, so your mission-critical process is never dependent upon an irreplaceable individual.

1. Tungsten Clustering is a complete solution, comprised of the Replicator, Manager and Connector components
   • With DIY, you must first decide the architecture, then select the individual tools to handle each layer of the topology. …

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 …

Continuent is pleased to announce that the following new software releases are now available:

• Tungsten Clustering version 5.4.0
• Tungsten Replicator version 5.4.0

Releases 5.4.0 is significant in that it introduces MySQL 8 support, along with many new features, stability improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights common to both products:

Improvements, new features and functionality

• Two new utility scripts have been added to the release to help with setting the Replicator position:
  • tungsten_find_position, which assists with locating information in the THL based on the provided MySQL binary log event position and outputs a dsctl set …

Continuent is pleased to announce that the following new software releases are now available:

• Tungsten Clustering version 6.1.0
• Tungsten Replicator version 6.1.0

Release 6.1.0 is significant in that it introduces MySQL 8 support, along with many new features, stability improvements and bug fixes.

Highlights common to both products:

Improvements, new features and functionality

• Two new utility scripts have been added to the release to help with setting the Replicator position:
  • tungsten_find_position, which assists with locating information in the THL based on the provided MySQL binary log event position and outputs a dsctl set command …

Overview The Skinny

Part of the power of Tungsten Clustering for MySQL / MariaDB is its intelligent MySQL Proxy, known as the Tungsten Connector. Tungsten Connector has three main modes, and depending on the type of operations you are performing (such as if you need read-write splitting), we help you choose which mode is best.

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

How can I tell which Tungsten Connector mode I am using: Bridge, Proxy/Direct or Proxy/SmartScale?

The Answer Connect and Observe

You may login through the Connector to tell the difference between Bridge mode and Proxy mode (either Direct or SmartScale):

In Proxy mode, you will see the -tungsten tag appended to the Server version string:

 …

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

Where are the logs for a Tungsten Cluster and which are the proper log files to monitor if I do a master role switch to another node?

The Answer: Part I Both basic and advanced logs are available!

The basic logs are symbolic links into the log subdirectory for each layer of the cluster.

For example, this is the listing of the default log directory, /opt/continuent/service_logs:

connector-user.log -> /opt/continuent/tungsten/tungsten-connector/log/connector-user.log
manager-user.log -> /opt/continuent/tungsten/tungsten-manager/log/manager-user.log
mysqldump.log -> /opt/continuent/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/log/mysqldump.log
replicator-user.log -> /opt/continuent/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/log/replicator-user.log
xtrabackup.log -> /opt/continuent/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/log/xtrabackup.log

As you can see, each log file is a …

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

After importing a new section of user data into our Tungsten cluster, we are seeing perpetually rising replication lag. We are sitting at 8.5hrs estimated convergence time after importing around 50 million rows and this lag is climbing continuously. We are currently migrating some of our users from a NoSQL database into our Tungsten cluster. We have a procedure to write out a bunch of CSV files after translating our old data into columns and then we recursively send them to the write master using the mysql client. Specifically our import SQL is doing LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE and the reading in a large CSV file to do the import. We have 20k records per CSV file and we have 12 workers which insert them in parallel.

Simple Overview The Skinny

In cases like this, the slaves are having trouble with the database unable to keep up with the apply stage …