Tungsten Clustering is an extraordinarily flexible tool, with options at every layer of operation.

In this blog post, we will describe and discuss the two different methods for installing, updating and upgrading Tungsten Clustering software.

When first designing a deployment, the question of installation methodology is answered by inspecting the environment and reviewing the customer’s specific needs.

Staging Deployment Methodology

All for One and One for All

Staging deployments were the original method of installing Tungsten Clustering, and relied upon command-line tools to configure and install all cluster nodes at once from a central location called the staging server.

This staging server (which could be one of the cluster nodes) requires SSH access to all …

Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data and therefore proper performance under load is critical to business health. If response time is slow, customers (and staff) get frustrated and the business suffers a slow-down.

If the database layer is unable to keep up with demand, all applications can and will suffer slow performance as a result.

To prevent this situation, use load tests to determine the throughput as objectively as possible.

In the sample load.pl script below, increase load by increasing the thread quantity.

You could also run this on a database with data in it without polluting the existing data since new test databases are created to match each node’s hostname for uniqueness.

Note: The examples in this blog post assume that a Connector is …

In a previous post we went into detail about how to implement Tungsten-specific checks. In this post we will focus on the other standard Nagios checks that would help keep your cluster nodes healthy.

Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data. The slave nodes must be online, healthy and in sync with the master in order to be viable failover candidates.

This means keeping a close watch on the health of the databases nodes from many perspectives, from ensuring sufficient disk space to testing that replication traffic is flowing.

A robust monitoring setup is essential for cluster health and viability – if your replicator goes offline and you do not know about it, then that slave becomes effectively useless because it has stale data.

Nagios Checks The Power of Persistence

One …

The Player Accounts team at Riot Games needed to consolidate the player account infrastructure and provide a single, global accounts system for the League of Legends player base. To do this, they migrated hundreds of millions of player accounts into a consolidated, globally replicated composite database cluster in AWS. This provided higher fault tolerance and lower latency access to account data. In this talk by Tyler Turk (Infrastructure Engineer, Riot Games), we discuss this effort to migrate eight disparate database clusters into AWS as a single composite database cluster replicated in four different AWS regions, provisioned with terraform, and managed and operated by Ansible. …

Your database cluster contains your most business-critical data. The slave nodes must be online, healthy and in sync with the master in order to be viable failover candidates.

This means keeping a close watch on the health of the databases nodes from many perspectives, from ensuring sufficient disk space to testing that replication traffic is flowing.

A robust monitoring setup is essential for cluster health and viability – if your replicator goes offline and you do not know about it, then that slave becomes effectively useless because it has stale data.

Big Brother is Watching You! The Power of Nagios

Even while you sleep, your servers are busy, and you simply cannot keep watch all the time. Now, more than ever, with global deployments, it is literally impossible to watch everything all the time.

Enter Nagios, you best big brother ever. As a long-time player in the monitoring market, Nagios has both …

Continuent Clustering support true distributed multimaster clustering. In this topology, there are cross-site replicator services for each remote site. In a 3-site configuration, there are a total of 9 replication streams to manage.

Continuent Clustering also offers a graphical administration tool called the Tungsten Dashboard to help with your management burden. The GUI makes the deployment much easier to visualize and administer.

For our example, we will have a Composite Multimaster dataservice called global with three active, writable member clusters (one per site), east, west and north.

Dashboard Summary View

In the summary, collapsed view, the composite service and all member clusters are listed with associated information and controls. Note that the Type for the composite dataservice global is CompMM …

Watch the relay of this webinar and learn how Bluefin Payment Systems provides 24/7/365 operation and application availability for their PayConex payment gateway and Decryptx decryption-as-a-service, essential to point-of-sale (POS) solutions in retail, mobile, call centers and kiosks.

We discuss why Bluefin uses Continuent Clustering, and how Bluefin runs two co-located data centers with multimaster replication between each cluster in each data center, with full failover within the cluster and between clusters, handling 350 million records each month.

Watch this webinar replay at https://youtu.be/crlgsflH7Gw

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 …

Join MC Brown, VP Products at Continuent, on August 8th for our new webinar on high availability and disaster recovery for MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server with Continuent Clustering. Learn how Bluefin Payment Systems provides 24/7/365 operation and application availability for their PayConex payment gateway and Decryptx decryption-as-a-service, essential for Point-Of-Sale solutions in retail, mobile, call centers and kiosks.

We’ll discuss why Bluefin uses Continuent Clustering, and how Bluefin runs two co-located data centers with multimaster replication between each cluster in each data center, with full fail-over within the cluster and between clusters, handling 350 million records each month.

Tune in …

Did you know that Continuent Clustering supports having clusters at multiple sites world-wide with active-active 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.

The possibilities are endless, as is the business value. This strong topology allows you to have all the benefits of high availability with local reads and writes, while spreading that data globally to be accessible in all regions. Latency is limited only by the WAN link and the speed of the target node.

This aligns perfectly with the distributed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model where customers and data span the globe. Applications have access to ALL the …