When discussing how to achieve High Availability most DBMS focus on handling it via replication. Most of the focus has thus been focused on various replication algorithms.

However truly achieving AlwaysOn availability requires more than just a clever replication algorithm.

RonDB is based on NDB Cluster, NDB has been able to prove in practice that it can deliver capabilities that makes it possible to build systems with less than 30 seconds of downtime per year.

So what is required to achieve this type of availability?

1. Replication
2. Instant Failover
3. Global Replication
4. Failfast Software Architecture
5. Modular Software Architecture
6. Advanced Crash Analysis
7. Managed software

Thus a clever replication algorithm is only 1 of 7 very important parts to achieve the highest possible …

 In the 1990s I spent a few years studying requirements on databases used in 3G telecom networks. The main requirement was centered around three keywords, Latency, Throughput and Availability. In this blog post I will focus on Availability.

If a telecom database is down it means that no phone calls can be made, internet connections will not work and your app on your smartphone will cease to work. So more or less impacting each and everyone's life immediately.

The same requirements on databases now also start to appear in AI applications such as online Fraud detection, self-driving cars, smartphone apps.

Availability is measured in percent and for telecom databases the requirement is to reach 99.9999% availability. One often calls this Class 6 availability where 6 is the number of nines in the availability percentage.

Almost every database …