Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Power Outage Takes Wikimedia Down

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the problem-with-non-absolute-power dept.

Baricom writes "Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out well-known blogging service LiveJournal for several hours, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation's services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colo. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page here until power returns."

4 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. Another indictment of MySql by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although we use MySQL's transactional InnoDB tables, they can still sometimes be left in an unrecoverable state

    Ya know, I just don't understand why so many projects with such high visibility and requirements for reliability use a toy database like MySQL.

    Someone PLEASE tell me why. Because right now the only thing I can think is that people just don't know how to pronounce "Postgres".

    1. Re:Another indictment of MySql by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No database can guarantee data integrity in the case of a power failure

      This is false. SQL Server 2000 (yeah, I know, instant mod-down) has a transaction log and so does Oracle and I'm sure every other half-decent database. ALL committed transactions are preserved and the data is in a consistent state.

      MySQL does not have this and the developers don't seem to care much about it. This is the problem with open-source in general, if someone is just doing it for fun they aren't going to spend any time on the stuff they don't care about personally.

    2. Re:Another indictment of MySql by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Since at least one of our MySQL database servers has so far restarted successfully with all InnoDB data intact, perhaps you'd care to reconsider your assessment that MySQL is incapable of doing what it just did?

      But one didn't. That's a much more informative data point.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  2. Re:mysql bad at disaster recovery? by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's a simple way around this: stick to PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, DB/2, or some other real database. MySQL doesn't make the grade, precisely because things like this can happen.