Those who build SaaS know that you’re actually providing an experience. You’re building long-term relationships and aiming for recurring revenue. Therefore, your product must be flexible, resilient, and consistent.

Many companies find it hard to take time, acquire the right ingredients, and design truly great software from the bottom-up. This is understandable given how fast the SaaS industry moves.

But firstly, who am I to be talking about this subject? My education was in Economics and Complex Systems, and I’ve been fortunate to gain exposure to various IT trends and tools working almost a decade mostly in Tech. I started interviewing customers at Continuent (majority SaaS) over five years ago, and I have listened to a number of …

Overview

Clustering provides high availability and disaster recovery, along with the ability to read-scale both locally and globally. Some clusters even provide active/active capabilities, which others have a single master.

Real time database replication is a must for clustering and other key business purposes, like reporting. There are a number of replication technologies available for MySQL, and some are even bundled into various solutions. When choosing a replication methodology, it is paramount to understand just how the data moves from source to target. In this blog post, we will examine how asynchronous, synchronous, and “semi-synchronous” replication behave when used for clustering. Also, we will explore how …

Database Administration is a tough, often ungrateful job. Especially if you run a 24/7 business-critical MySQL or MariaDB deployment.

MySQL has proven to be a remarkably solid database which supports billions of dollars in revenue. On some level this very solidity creates a false sense of security. There are many things that can wrong at any given time, whether that is a change to your app, a bug in the database, hardware failure or just simply running out of disk space.

Percona recently conducted a poll: “What keeps you up at night?”

Not surprisingly, “Downtime/HA” is very high on the list.

While there are many challenging issues and tasks that a DBA must deal …

If you share your photos on social media, they will stay on the internet forever…

Many of us have heard or read this sentence during conversations with friends, in articles, online forums, TV shows, etc.

But how is it possible that we can’t seem to be able to fully remove our photos from the internet when we want to, and, taking this further, that our photos are never lost and always retrievable (which can both be a good and a bad thing)?

The behind-the-scenes, technical secret lies in data replication.

The very first moment when you share a photo on social media, that photo is uploaded into the closest available database server. In the second moment, that same photo is replicated into multiple other servers around the world.

This is what data …

We’re pleased to share our webinar “Multi-Region AWS Aurora vs Continuent Tungsten for MySQL & MariaDB”, recorded live on Thursday, April 18th, 2019.

Our colleague Matt Lang walks you through a comparison of building a global, multi-region MySQL / MariaDB / Percona cloud back-end using AWS Aurora versus Continuent Tungsten.

If you’d like to find out how multi-region AWS Aurora deployments can be improved – then this webinar is for you!

We hope you enjoy it!

Recorded:

Thursday, April 18th at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST

Recording: follow this link to watch

Slides: …

In case you missed the Multimaster webinar recorded live on Thursday, March 28th, 2019:

Learn how NewVoiceMedia built a global, multi-region MySQL cloud back-end to support a high-volume cloud contact center. 

Agenda:

Find out how to deploy Multimaster MySQL / MariaDB / Percona with the following design criteria:

• Geographically distributed, low-latency data
• Fast local response times for read & write traffic
• Full ACID compliance – atomic operations, guaranteed consistency, isolation, and durability
• Local rapid-failover, automated high availability

Speaker:

Chris Parker

Director of Professional Services – EMEA/APAC, is based in the UK, and has over 20 …

For those of you who missed the webinar, “Geo-Scale MySQL in AWS,” recorded live on Thursday, March 14th, 2019:

Learn how to build a global, multi-region MySQL / MariaDB / Percona cloud back-end capable of serving hundreds of millions of online multiplayer game accounts.

Agenda:

Find out how Riot Games serves a globally distributed audience with low-latency, fast response times for read traffic, rapid-failover automated high availability, simple administration, system visibility, and stability.

Speaker:

Eric M. Stone

COO at Continuent, is a veteran of fast-paced, large-scale enterprise environments with 35 years of Information Technology experience. With a focus on HA/DR, from building data centers and trading floors to world-wide deployments, Eric has …

Enterprises require high availability for their business-critical applications. Even the smallest unplanned outage or even a planned maintenance operation can cause lost sales, productivity, and erode customer confidence. Additionally, updating and retrieving data needs to be robust to keep up with user demand.

Let’s take a look at how Tungsten Clustering helps enterprises keep their data available and globally scalable, and compare it to Amazon’s RDS running MySQL (RDS/MySQL).

Replicas and Failover What does RDS do?

Having multiple copies of a database is ideal for high availability. RDS/MySQL approaches this with “Multi-AZ” deployments. The term “Multi-AZ” here is a bit confusing, as enabling this simply means a single “failover replica” will be created in a different availability zone from the primary database instance. …