I've seen some posts on our forums and comments on our website telling us that the Cluster Storage Engine is missing. Yes, it's not anymore in MySQL 5.1.24-rc and later. It has been pulled out to go into a different distribution.
Reading the ChangeLog is a good thing!

• Speaker: Mikael Ronstrom, PhD, the creator of the Cluster engine
• Explains the cluster structure
• Aspects of performance
  • Response times
  • Throughput
  • Low variation of response times
• Improving performance
  • use low level API (NDB API), expensive, hard
  • use new features in MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 (currently 6.3.13), more on this later
  • proper partitioning of tables, minimize communication
  • use of hardware
• NDB API is a C++ record access API
  • supports sending parallel record operations within the same transaction or in different transactions
  • asynchronous and synchronous
  • NDB kernel is programmed entirely asynchronously
  …

I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!

Today I am attending Stewart's …

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

If you have a 12-server MySQL Cluster with: 1 Management Node 3 SQL Nodes 2 Data Node Groups, 4 Data Nodes per group And each machine is configured to allocate 1G of memory for its function, how much data (data + indexes) can you store in total in your cluster? You can guess, but you get bonus points if you [...]

Someone asked me what applications were good/bad for MySQL Cluster. As I’ve now actually had experience with a Cluster setup and a real-life application of it, and dug through the manual, I present a few characteristics of applications that will work with Cluster, and why they are so (so that if you have an [...]

Apart form the Xen book I coauthored earlier this year the nice folks of the MySQL documentation team asked me to review parts of their MySQL Cluster Certification guide.

After a long wait it's finally out !
In contrary to the other one, this book took over a year to finish because there was actually a lot of reviewing done by different people.

You can buy it now at Lulu.com !

John might want to read it to figure out about his 5th step.

I’m setting up my first mysql cluster, and just wanted some clarification on a few things.

In the manual, it says:

Online schema changes. It is not possible to make online schema changes such as those accomplished using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX, as the NDB Cluster engine does not support autodiscovery of such changes. (However, you can import or create a table that uses a different storage engine, and then convert it to NDB using ALTER TABLE tbl_name ENGINE=NDBCLUSTER. In such a case, you must issue a FLUSH TABLES statement to force the cluster to pick up the change.)

MySQL Cluster Exclusive Limitations

However, on another cluster limitations page, it says:

DDL operations. DDL operations (such as CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE) are not safe from data node failures. …

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

So I'm not going to claim to be Kevin Closson - because I'm not. I'm also not going to wade into a shared-nothing vs. shared-storage architecture debate. And here's why: there is no right answer.

As with anything else, it comes down to what you want to do. Look at what Kevin says in his very long-windedly (yet nicely) titled:
Nearly Free or Not, GridSQL for EnterpriseDB is Simply Better Than Real Application Clusters. It is Shared-Nothing Architecture After All! « Kevin Closson?s Oracle Blog: Platform, Storage & Clustering Topics Related to Oracle Databases

Folks, today?s applications are built on large numbers of tables and complex joins. The reason shared-nothing is nothing like RAC is because instead of only …