Blogs

Galera Cluster for MySQL 5.5.29-23.7.3 has been released. This is a maintenance release with several important bug fixes. Downloads are available from our Launchpad download area: MySQL with Wsrep API 5.5.29-23.7.3 and Galera library 23.2.4.

This release includes RHEL/Centos 6 RPM binaries. The Galera library also introduces as experimental feature a preview from our Galera 3.x development work: weighted quorum calculation.

As usual, feedback and bug reports are welcome: Bug tracker, Mailing list.

Codership recommends commercial 24/7 support for production installations of Galera Cluster.

While Spring is already arrived in mainland Europe, we still had some 10 cm snow that came down yesterday in Finland (in addition to the already accumulated snow). Still, the warm and bright sunshine can't be ignored: It is Spring and that means conferences and meetups are in full swing. There is a lot of interest in Galera, so you can expect to have a Galera talk at almost any event nowadays:

MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 stable (GA) has been released by the MariaDB team today. This is good news to all those MariaDB users that have been waiting to get Galera synchronous multi-master replication to their favorite MySQL flavor. MariaDB Galera Cluster is available from the MariaDB.org download area.

Thank you!

Readers of the MySQLPlus blog have voted Galera as the top choice in the "What would you like to test in 2013?" category. We apparently are narrowly more interesting to test than MySQL 5.6, which is both humbling and difficult to put into right perspective. But we were all very glad to find out about this selection for sure!

Last weekend I attended my first Fosdem conference. It was great to finally visit the conference that might be the biggest open source conference in the world. It's also an amazing experience how our Belgian friends pull off such a magnificent event purely with volunteer effort. You might say the conference itself is very much open source: free entry, created by volunteers. Organizers estimated that this year there were 7000+ attendees on campus. A hard data point was over 2300 simultaneous devices connected to Wifi.

Last week I wrote about our participation in the SkySQL and MariaDB roadshow. First event in Stuttgart completed on Friday, and the tour continues into Hamburg this Friday and Stockholm on February 7th.

But we will also be busy speaking at some other conferences this Spring.

SkySQL is a well known support provider in the MySQL ecosystem and since 2012 they are also an official Galera partner. SkySQL customers can get Galera Cluster for MySQL support as part of their SkySQL support contract, and issues are handled by the same experienced and friendly support engineers whether they relate to Galera or not. Codership engineers will collaborate with SkySQL support engineers to fix Galera specific bugs or problems, providing the customer a seamless support experience.

Our site gets dozens of bot registrations on a daily basis. I believe every site with membership does. It is so pointless (and yet so easy to achieve, so "we do it because we can"), that its depressing:

A common question, especially for a new technology like Galera, is always that people want to know who else is already using the technology. In terms of sales this is often called reference customers. Over the last year we've seen some case studies and press releases regarding business critical Galera option, so I have now collected all of those to our website's User Stories section.

Some highlights of the newly added user stories include:

A week or two ago I heard second hand about someone saying "they can't use Galera because they use SAN for everything". Well, just so there is no doubt: You can perfectly well use Galera together with SAN. Galera is quite agnostic about the disks used.

In fact, Galera might be a great option together with SAN. Often SAN means slightly worse latency for disk writes, in particular when used with iSCSI. If the network path to the SAN is poor, it might mean a big performance hit, actually. Galera is in fact a good fit here, because the default/recommended setting for a Galera cluster is to relax the durability settings for InnoDB (innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit), since durability is primarily guaranteed by the syncrhonous nature of the replication. (Same philosophy as is applied in the architecture for MySQL NDB Cluster.) This reduced stress on the disk can actually improve your experience with a SAN. A case in point is running Galera in the Amazon cloud with EBS volumes, we constantly get very good performance results in that environment compared to the competition.