Tungsten 2.0.5 with more power and ease of use

Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5 was released this week-end. The release notes have quite a long list of bug fixes. Thanks to all the ones who have submitted bug reports, and fixes! There are a couple of new features as well. The replicator includes now a slave prefetch service. Unlike parallel replication, this feature works fine with a single database, and provides performance improvements that in many cases solve the slave lagging problems. This was a bitch of a feature to get right. Many have tried it, many have experienced various degrees of success, and several failures. We started with the bold assertiveness of the brave after an exciting talk at Percona Live in October, and I was sorry to report one bad performance result after the other for a few months, until finally the tide turned, and the good results started showing up, and improving! The key to success was the realization that the prefetch is hard to set up and tune right, but also the need for multiple threads that do the pre-fetching efficiently. Since we had already an efficient engine that we use for parallel replication, the final design started bearing fruits at the end of January, and became definitely good and reliable in February. The other noteworthy improvements were made in the installer. Thanks to the many users who have tried it and reported usability issues, we have made the Tungsten Replicator installation a much better experience, and a powerful tool. The best proof of the installer maturity is that the prefetch installation required little work to be implemented and it worked flawlessly at the first attempt! Other improvements in the tools include trepctl and thl better understanding of their environment. They no longer require a service name if there is only one installed in a given host, and they provide more instrumentation for parallel replication, pre-fetching, and for the processing of huge transactions (quite common when dealing with RBR). This version was also the first with Oracle to MySQL support. This is not open source, however. As this feature requires substantial investments, it is not possible to release it as the rest of the replicator. But the list of goodies is not over yet. The feature that probably more than anything else has been used in the past months has been the star schema topology, which is something that was probably possible in 2.0.4, but nobody had tried it before.

We are not stopping here, however. The investment in the installer has given us the know-how necessary to improve and simplify the installation of our flagship product (Tungsten Enterprise) which is about to ship with similar usability enhancements. We have plans to enhance multiple master replication and management, we are developing powerful parallel processing administration tools, and we are also trying to simplify the powerful filters that Tungsten provides. There are more open source releases to discuss, but these will require more than one article to be described conveniently. We have released more tools in the Tungsten Toolbox project. A better Tungsten Sandbox, capable of installing every technology, and some more ancillary tools for Tungsten. I will come back to those in the near future. Much as I like coding, I also like talking about the cool things that we have made. And, another thing that kept me busy and happy: Continuent and SkySQl are now partners. This has given me quite a lot of work, since we had deliver training to SkySQL field operatives. It was a beautiful experience (teaching to a class of advanced users always is) also because most of the attendees were my former colleagues at MySQL AB. The future looks good. More to come.