MariaDB Galera Cluster ready for production use

MariaDB now has a high-availability option ready for production use; the developers at MariaDB and Codership have released MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 as a Stable GA (generally available) version. The release gives MariaDB users access to a scaling solution for the SQL database with synchronous multi-master replication and guaranteed data consistency. Clusters built with the technology should prove automatically resilient with no risk of losing nodes with unique datasets on them.

Originally developed by Codership for MySQL, Galera Cluster uses its own replication technology. In September 2012, the first alpha version of MariaDB Galera Cluster was released with a commitment to rapidly roll out the GA product and services. SkySQL is working with MariaDB and Codership to provide enterprise customer support for the product.

The release announcement covers the highlights of the new product. Cluster management is handled by automated membership control with automatic node joining and failed node dropping. The database synchronisation, with row-level parallel replication, has been developed by enhancing MariaDB to support the Write Set Replication API (wsrep) which has been implemented in the open source MySQL-wsrep project. According to the developers, the solution offers a system with no slave lag or lost transactions, smaller client latencies and scalability in both read and write handling.

The release notes detail how to install from repositories and include a link to the MariaDB Repository Configuration Tool which can generate the commands needed to install MariaDB Galera on many Linux distributions. More detailed installation and configuration instructions and information on known limitations are also available from the AskMonty Knowledgebase. Source code and some binaries can be downloaded from the MariaDB web site. The software is licensed under the GPLv2.

(djwm)