This article is the third in a series on data fabric design and introduces the fabric connector service design pattern.  The previous article in this series introduced the transactional data service design pattern, which defines individual data stores and is the building block for data fabrics based on SQL databases.  The fabric connector builds on transactional data services and is another basic building block of fabric architecture.

Description and Responsibilities
Fabric connectors make a collection of DBMS servers look like a single server.  The fabric connector presents what appears to be a data service API to applications.  It routes each request to an appropriate physical …

Data management is undergoing a revolution.  Many businesses now depend on data sets that vastly exceed the capacity of DBMS servers.  Applications operate 24x7 in complex cloud environments using small and relatively unreliable VMs.  Managers need to act on new information from those systems in real-time. Users want constant and speedy access to their data in locations across the planet.

It is tempting to think popular SQL databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL have no place in this new world.  They manage small quantities of data, lack scalability features like parallel query, and have weak availability models.  One reaction is to discard them and adopt alternatives like Cassandra or MongoDB.  Yet open source SQL databases have tremendous strengths:  simplicity, robust transaction support, lightning fast operation, flexible APIs, and broad communities of users familiar with their operation.  The …

We have started a new series of webinars at Continuent that we call Tungsten University.  They provide education on Tungsten clustering and replication in handy one-hour chunks.  These are not sales pitches.  Our goal is to provide accessible education about setting up and operating Tungsten without any marketing fluff.

The first Tungsten University webinar entitled "Configure & provision Tungsten clusters" will take place on Thursday January 17th at 10:00 PST.  It will show you how to set up a cluster in Amazon EC2.  There will be a repeat on January 22nd at 15:00 GMT.  We usually record webinars, so you can look at them later as well. 
You do not have to be a customer to attend these …

The recent release of the MariaDB client libraries has prompted questions about their purpose as well as provenance.  Colin Charles posted that some of these would be answered in the very near future.  I have a couple of specific questions about the MariaDB JDBC driver, which I hope will be addressed at that time.  
1.) What is really in the MariaDB JDBC driver and how exactly does it differ from the drizzle JDBC driver?  What, if any, relation is there to Connector/J code?  There is a  …

The  MariaDB Foundation announcement spawned some interesting commentary about the state of open source databases.  One recent headline cited the "beleaguered MySQL community." Beleaguered is a delightful adjective.  The OED tells us that it means beset, invested, or besieged.  Much as I like the word, I do not think it is an accurate or useful description of the MySQL community.  This article and others like it miss the point of what is happening to MySQL and its users.

Let's start by disproving that the notion that the MySQL community is beleaguered.  I don't …

Percona hosted another excellent Percona Live conference this past December 3-4 in London.  It was my pleasure to deliver 3 talks including the first keynote following Peter Zaitsev.  Percona does a great job of organizing these conferences--this year's London conference was well attended and in an excellent location in Kensington.  My thanks to the entire Percona team for putting this together.

Here are the slides for my talks in case you would like to see them.

Keynote:  Future-Proofing MySQL for the World-Wide Data Revolution -- Covering the greatly exaggerated death of MySQL and design patterns for robust MySQL systems that can last for decades

Talk:   …

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and uninstalling all.

All the above will be demonstrated during the tutorial, with the addition of conflict prevention and more management …

Continuent is proud to sponsor Percona Live MySQL Conference: London 2012!  Don't miss these five (5) talks by our database replication and clustering stars:

Keynote: Future-Proofing MySQL for the World-Wide Data Revolution, by Robert Hodges Why, What, and How of Data Warehouses for MySQL, by Robert Hodges Multi-master, Multi-site MySQL Databases Made Easy with Continuent Tungsten, by Robert

Tungsten Replicator version 2.0.6 was released today.

You can get both the binaries and the source code at the project's downloads page.

This release contains many bug fixes, and various improvements. All of them are listed in the Release Notes. The most interesting ones are the improvement in multi-master topologies. Using this release with star topologies you will get less traffic than before, because we have reduced some duplication of transaction history logs that were sent between servers.

And speaking of multi-master topologies, this release includes the cookbook recipes mentioned in this blog …

Attached are the slides for my MySQL Connect talk Evaluating MySQL High-availability alternatives, which I will present today at 14:30 at the MySQL Connect conference.

A bit unusually I'm posting the material ahead of the talk. The point of the talk is about evaluating each alternative from your own perspective. With that in mind, if you're at the talk with your own laptop, feel free to browse the slides at your own pace from here.

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