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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."

2 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.