There and in coming posts I am going to cover main features of Percona XtraDB Cluster. The first feature is High Availability.

But before jumping to HA, let’s review general architecture of the Percona XtraDB Cluster.

1. The Cluster consists of Nodes. Recommended configuration is to have at least 3 nodes, but you can make it running with 2 nodes too.
2. Each Node is regular MySQL / Percona Server setup. The point is that you can convert your existing MySQL / Percona Server into Node and roll Cluster using it as base. Or otherwise – you can detach Node from Cluster and use it as just a regular server.
3. Each Node contains the full copy of data. That defines XtraDB Cluster behavior in many ways. And obviously there are benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits of such approach:

…

I understand that the new technology can be scaring and this makes entry barriers to try and get familiar with it.
That’s why I created simple set of scripts which setup N nodes cluster on running EC2 instances.

The script assumes that you have running N EC2 instances (in the same availability zone) running RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.2 64bit (I use m1.xlarge size).

You put hostnames of the instances into ec2hosts.txt file and run install.nodes.sh script.
You also should have your private key to access to your instances (test-cluster.pem in my case).

For my box installing and starting 3 nodes took exactly

time install.nodes.sh
...
real    2m51.257s

In fact you can deploy as many nodes as you want, I made also running 20 nodes cluster.

After that you have the cluster deployed and ready to accept queries!

The scripts are …

In this post I want to show new possibilities which open with Percona XtraDB Cluster.
We will create 3 nodes Cluster with nodes on different continents (Europe, USA, Japan) and each node will accept write queries.
Well, you theoretically could create 3 node traditional MySQL ring replication, but this is not what you want to use day-to-day.

To show how it works I will use Amazon m1.xlarge instances, by one in Tokyo, Ireland and North California, running RedHat Entreprise 6.2 64bit.

In fact to create instances is most time consuming task. After that using my script you will have cluster running in 5 min or less.

There however some precautions needed if you run Amazon instances.
First, you need to open ports in the firewall. For the communication the nodes need, …

You probably saw that Vadim blogged about the first alpha release of Percona XtraDB Cluster. Just in time: now I can talk about it at my High Availability talk in Percona Live DC! If you’re coming, be sure to catch us in the hallway and ask those specific questions that won’t be addressed in a general survey talk on HA solutions.

I am happy to announce the availability of alpha release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and based on Percona Server 5.5.17

Percona XtraDB Cluster provides:

• Synchronous replication. Transaction either commited on all nodes or none.
• Multi-master replication. You can write to any node.
• Parallel applying events on slave. Real “parallel replication”.
• Automatic node provisioning.
• Data consistency. No more unsyncronised slaves.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is fully compatible with MySQL or Percona Server in the following meaning:

• Data compatibility. Percona XtraDB Cluster works with …

I got a question a while ago about how Percona Server handles corrupted data more gracefully than the standard MySQL server from Oracle. The short version is that it won’t crash the whole server.

With standard MySQL from Oracle, if any page of data in InnoDB is found to be corrupt, the entire instance will crash forcefully. This is a good policy if you want to treat your entire data set as a single unit, which is either usable or not. However, this does not reflect reality for many users, who have a lot of data collocated in a single instance. In such cases, it is desirable for the server to continue running, so the corruption in one database does not affect the others.

Percona Server handles corruption more gracefully, if you enable it, by simply marking the single table as corrupt, and not crashing the entire server.

The relevant documentation is …

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories.

Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs are here), and you can come learn more in-person at the Washington DC Percona Live event next week. …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 on December 16, 2011 (Downloads are available from Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 downloads and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.60, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.60-13.1 milestone at Launchpad.

Bug …

Many of you have seen the announcement for our Percona Live in Washington, DC in January! But did you know we also have our highly rated MySQL Training coming to Washington, DC the week of January 16h? Full details can be found on the Percona website. If you would like to attend the MySQL Training, click here to register and receive a 20% discount.

We are pleased to announce availability of an early access version of Percona’s PAM Authentication plugin for MySQL. This plugin supports MySQL-5.5.x, Percona Server 5.5.x and MariaDB 5.2.x. The PAM Authentication plugin can be used for:

• MySQL authentication using operating system users (pam_unix)
• MySQL authentication from LDAP server (pam_ldap)
• authentication against RSA SecurID server
• any other authentication methods that provides access via PAM

We name it early access as it does not yet have the full list of features we want to implement. It is currently functional and we want to make it available for everybody. In this version you still need to create individual users in MySQL (even though they will be authenticated via PAM), in the final (non-early …