MySQL 5.0 Cluster: Architecture, Implementation, and Management
April 2006
Norm Collins
Today's networks and applications are concentrating more on high availability and redundancy. Corporations are selling services to customers with a "guarantee", or "service-level agreement" (SLA), that provides an overall percentage of uptime along with detailed instructions on the rebate structure if certain conditions are not met. One of the key components in the delivery of information to customers is the availability of data from a robust and effective database management system (DBMS).
MySQL is one of the main database management systems that corporations rely on to store their data. The release of MySQL 5.0 has brought many rich features that make it one of the leading database management systems available. Some of the new features include stored procedures, triggers, and views. Other features that have been previously available are replication and clustering. All of these features make MySQL what it is today. I will focus on one feature in particular -- the MySQL clustering technology.
In this article, I will discuss the benefits of using a MySQL cluster to corporations that require highly available data, the implementation of basic MySQL cluster using the minimum recommended requirements, and how to enhance the initial cluster to allow for more availability. I will also describe some cluster configuration options and some typical MySQL cluster management client commands for managing a cluster.
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