On Monday April 27th, MySQL released a much-anticipated patch release 8.0.20. Along with many bug fixes and improvements, a new property was introduced – binlog-transaction-compression. During our own internal testing we have discovered an incompatibility with our Continuent Tungsten products when this property is enabled.

The newly-released binlog-transaction-compression feature is really interesting because it compresses transaction payloads before being written into the binary logs, which in turn reduces the disk space overhead required for storage. I’m sure many users will be keen to implement this, however at this time the use of binlog-transaction-compression=ON will prevent Replication from functioning correctly.

This …

How to build a multi-region, multi-master MySQL cloud database back-end capable of serving a global high volume cloud contact center

This global SaaS provider is a Cloud Contact Center solution provider (the leading Salesforce telephony solution), who needed to deliver up-to-date data to clients as quickly as possible. Its cloud-based call center software frees users to make every conversation personal; it supports the creation of exceptional customer experiences that help serve better and sell more. Its technology is 100% cloud-based and device-agnostic for telephony infrastructure.

What is the Challenge?

Active/Active (multi-master) MySQL clustering is needed when there is significant update load on geographically distributed applications. These require fast response times both for updates and reads, and they also need to share data on a global scale.

• Regional distribution of data
• Deliver …

How to serve global IoT customers in the cloud – and secure SaaS revenue using Tungsten Clustering on cloud-based database services

SaaS providers typically rely on providing a quality service across multiple locations, with the best application and database availability. They tend to be growth-oriented and need to ensure that their business will always be available without having to worry about how their databases will achieve continuous operations.

Our customer for this use case is a global SaaS provider with an open data exchange platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) that has customers all over the globe.

This use case looks at how our customer migrated from a single region Amazon RDS deployment to a truly global, geo-distributed multi-master Tungsten Clustering database solution – a better, more scalable solution at a lower total cost. And how they did so without having to change their application, all the …

How to achieve MySQL high availability, data protection & disaster recovery

This MySQL high availability and disaster recovery use case is based on a customer of ours who is a government-regulated lottery service consisting of a number of games of chance. Its mission is to fuel imagination – and fund education for all citizens of their state as it uses the proceeds of its activities to do so. Through its games, it has provided billions of dollars in scholarship and other such education funding for several decades.

What is the Challenge?

As is common for gambling and betting organisations, our customer faced a number of challenges and needed to have a solid infrastructure in place in order to provide its services satisfactorily.

This includes:

• Ensuring 24/7/365 availability of its online gaming platform
• Handling thousands of transactions quickly and while ensuring zero downtime …

This is our third ‘multi-master MySQL’ blog in our Continuent MySQL Use Case series, with a focus on Telco providers. This blog concludes our multi-master MySQL mini-series along with the following two blogs:

• Multi-master MySQL for e-Commerce Sites
• Geo-distributed Multi-master MySQL for Financial Services SaaS Providers

As per our initial multi-master MySQL use case blog, multi-master replication for MySQL typically means that a user can write to any master node knowing that the write will be eventually consistent for …

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 …

For this next ‘multi-master MySQL’ blog in our Continuent MySQL Use Case series, we’re focusing on Financial Services Saas providers.

Often referred to as the number one open source database in the cloud, and a leading SaaS database, MySQL enables SaaS vendors to be competitive because it provides cost-effective data security and privacy, performance, and availability amongst other things, which are of particular importance for a SaaS business.

As per our previous multi-master MySQL use case blog (for e-commerce sites), multi-master replication for MySQL typically means that a user can write to any master node knowing that the write will be eventually consistent for all nodes in the cluster; unlike regular MySQL replication, where writes have to be applied to the sole master to ensure that it will be replicated to …

For this next blog in our Continuent MySQL Use Case series, we’re diving into a sub-series on the topic of ‘multi-master MySQL’.

We’ll cover three (3) multi-master MySQL use cases as part of this sub-series focusing first on e-commerce to start with, and then following up with use cases from financial services and telecommunications.

Multi-master replication for MySQL typically means that a user can write to any master node knowing that the write will be eventually consistent for all nodes in the cluster; unlike regular MySQL replication, where writes have to be applied to the sole master to ensure that it will be synched to all the slaves.

The First Multi-master Customer

The first Continuent multi-master customer is a leading fashion e-commerce company with sites servicing customers across the globe.

More specifically, it has four multi-brand online stores and several online flagship stores …

In this fourth post in our MySQL Use Case Blog Series we look at a customer of ours who was able to grow their Saas business from tens of customers initially to thousands of enterprise customers once they achieved continuous MySQL operations with Continuent Tungsten.

This particular customer, based in California, develops and sells automation software for account-based marketing as well as other marketing services and products such as SEO and content marketing. They provide solutions tailored for large enterprises and fast-growing, small businesses alike covering all industry types from technology all the way to higher education.

So how did this fast growing marketing automation SaaS provider scale from tens of customers to thousands of enterprise customers using Tungsten Clustering (currently with 600+ MySQL instances)?

The Challenge

SaaS and other web applications are inherently 24/7/365 operations, thus they …

Overview The Skinny

In this blog post we explore various options for tuning MySQL traffic routing in the Tungsten Connector for better control of the distribution.

A Tungsten Cluster relies upon the Tungsten Connector to route client requests to the master node or optionally to the slaves. The Connector makes decisions about where to route requests based on a number of factors.

This blog post will focus on the Load Balancer algorithms available via configuration that allow you to adjust the routing behavior of the Connector, along with ways to debug the Connector Load Balancer’s routing decisions.

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

How do I know which load balancer algorithm is in use by the Connector? And how do we enable debug logging for the Connector load balancer?