Blog

In this blog, Continuent’s CEO and Founder, Eero Teerikorpi, was prompted by a headline in the Finnish News to write about the MySQL and MariaDB business and ecosystem.

Running highly-available WordPress is especially challenging, because WordPress is not by nature Active/Active-aware, and will refuse to run in an environment where database writes are active-active. In this blog post Part 1, we will explore the design considerations for making WordPress highly-available at the database layer. We also cover some other WordPress HA architecture needs, like the need for a shared filesystem.

Tungsten Clustering depends on a number of prerequisites and best practices to function optimally. In this blog post, we explore a critical, yet easily-overlooked step when installing a Tungsten Cluster node - setting up start at boot, ideally under `systemd` control.

Continuent is the leading provider of database clustering for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona MySQL, enabling mission-critical apps to run on these open source databases globally. Having worked with several Fortune 100 customers and been around these database “farms,” I feel comfortable discussing what clustering is, and some of the benefits of clustering your database servers.

You already know that you need to back up your database, but it takes so long and requires a lot of compute resources. With a few tricks, we can make the backup process quick!

Prometheus and Grafana are open source tools that can be used for monitoring MySQL clusters. Prometheus can be used to collect metrics from MySQL clusters, and Grafana can be used to visualize the metrics. Starting with Tungsten v7+ and the new Tungsten APIv2, it’s become easy to leverage the best these powerful monitoring tools have to offer.

Migrating to the cloud with zero downtime is a problem that companies running mission-critical applications have to solve, but not on their own. If you’re running a MySQL or MariaDB database it can be easy. Many of our customers have done this successfully, simplifying their overall Cloud migration process by making the database layer easy to move. It’s one less thing to worry about.

Thinking transparent reconnects of applications is the grail of HA? It is! But Active/Active setups make them risky.

Scalability is necessary to keep your database from crumbling under increased traffic. A scalable database must be able to handle larger data sets and more queries per second (both read and write), and the architecture must support these higher workloads seamlessly and efficiently. This blog attempts to explain what sharding is versus the pod architecture that some of our customers employ.

Tungsten is the go-to replication and clustering solution for MySQL - powering real-world, geo-distributed business-critical applications. Sometimes we get asked by those who are not familiar with us, what we mean by “MySQL,” and this blog is meant to shed some light on this question.

One of the common misconceptions about Continuent is that because Tungsten does not have an open source license, we do not support open source. In fact, quite the opposite, in everything we do. The whole purpose of Tungsten Clustering is to empower and enable teams that build business-critical applications on open source databases.

This leads us to the subject of this blog: how Tungsten is designed for openness.

There are many options for databases, and many organizations use multiple different types for their various use cases. In this blog we explore the use case of a business-critical or mission-critical application that requires a performant, robust and reliable OLTP RDBMS, and a few reasons to stick with a native open source database for this use case.