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Open Source Database Clusters?

Posted by Cliff on from the prime-time-league-contenders-yet? dept.

grugruto asks: "A lot of open source solutions are available to scale web sites with clusters but what about databases? I can't afford an Oracle RAC license but can I have something more reliable and fault tolerant than my single Postgres box? I have seen this recent article that looks promising for open source solutions. Do anyone have experiences with clusters of MySQL , Postgres-R, C-JDBC or other solutions? How does it compare to commercial products?"

3 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. transactionality is hard by solarisguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For what it's worth, the commercial solutions are hard to setup, unstable and terribly difficult to maintain, and this is after a small fortune has been invested in making them work. Not to knock the open source solution, but it's hard to beleive that something that is infrequently used and difficult to understand will be truly production quality if you want to use it for money.

  2. Re:-1:Troll by venom600 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ACID enforcement isn't there
    Actually ACID compliance is getting pretty darn good in databases like MySQL. Care to elaborate about what ACID compliance issues you have?

    Don't be an OSS idealogue in the business world, you end up unemployed.
    Actually, in our flailing economy 'OSS idealogues' as you call them are making a lot of head-way. OSS now has a viable alternative to *just about* any commercial enterprise software out there.

  3. High Availability by mcdrewski42 · · Score: 5, Insightful


    HA is always crapshoot/tradeoff between cost and risk. Throw enough $ at the problem and you'll approach 100% availability.

    I know that 'more robust' is a nice thing to want, but you really need to think about what you really need. If it takes 15 minutes to switch over to a backup copy (using some magic RAID disk mirroring maybe?) and 15 minutes to restart the app and let it checkpoint it's way up to a decent operational speed again, is that good enough?

    If it takes an hour, how about that?

    How much time/heartache or money is it worth for you to have system downtime, and how much are you willing to expend to reduce it by 5, 15, 30 minutes?

    So, there's really a continuum of availabilty you have to pick your point in. At the low end, you have no backups and recreate everything from scratch. At the high end you use Vendor X's real clustering solution and 24x7 monitoring, then have zero downtime even in a disaster. Somewhere in the middle is you.

    Now I realise this an overtly commercial view of things, but if needs be replace money with effort and season to taste.

    --
    /* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }