> Moreover, it works today as opposed to waiting until the end > of time for the database developers to add features like that > (which mysql cluster is already a distributed database, and > the devs have said they're not interested in trying to turn > the regular mysql into a distributed product, instead they > want to focus on what it does best)
With all due respect to the mySQL cluster people, setting up a mySQL cluster just isn't in the cards for lots of organizations. It's just too much. There's a huge implementation gap between a single mySQL server and a mySQL Cluster. I've also heard from people who have tried to implement mySQL clustering that wide-area cluster replication is hard or impossible (I can't remember which), so the ability to provide geographic redundancy (one of my requirements here) isn't workable. I think saying that I'd have to wait until the end of time is a bit harsh. Sure, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but I wasn't expecting that anyhow. I'm not sure if you've looked at the database integration for things like Drupal, but there will probably never be a way for Drupal to use an "updates go to this server, reads go to this server" configuration, as there are thousands of Drupal modules and almost all of them use the database directly, and each would have to be re-coded to work with the read/write split configuration. And anyhow, I think that suggestion is missing the point: If each application handles this sort of thing differently, then when I run all these applications on my server (and I do - we host about 175 web sites altogether) I have to configure each application separately, and I have to instruct all my users (many of them inexperienced grad students) to remember that "writes go here, reads go there" when they write their own PHP code. And, of course, handling this sort of thing at the application level means that some applications will never support it, and therefore never be able to be geographically redundant. So yeah, maybe lots of custom-written software handles the read/write split configuration well, but there's lots more that doesn't. I don't know of a single open source application that does. So again, I go back to my original statement: replication is a database server problem, not an application problem. :) Tim Gustafson Baskin School of Engineering UC Santa Cruz t...@soe.ucsc.edu 831-459-5354 -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
