MySQL Fabric: Musings on Release 1.4.3

As you might have noticed in the press release, we just released MySQL Utilities 1.4.3, containing MySQL Fabric, as a General Availability (GA) release. This concludes the first chapter of the MySQL Fabric story.

It all started with the idea that it should be as easy to manage and setup a distributed deployments with MySQL servers as it is to manage the MySQL servers themselves. We also noted that some of the features that were most interesting were sharding and high-availability. Since we also recognized that every user had different needs and needed to customize the solution, we set of to create a framework that would support sharding and high-availability, but also other solutions.

With the release of 1.4.3, we have a range of features that are now available to the community, and all under an open source license and wrapped in an easy-to-use package:

• High-availability support using built-in slave promotion in a master-slave configuration.
• A framework with an execution machinery, monitoring, and interfaces to support management of large server farms.
• Sharding using hash and range sharding. Range sharding is currently limited to integers, but hash sharding support anything that looks like a string.
• Shard management support to move and split shards.
• Support for failure detectors, both built-in and custom ones.
• Connectors with built-in load balancing and fail-over in the event of a master failure.

Beyond MySQL Fabric 1.4.3

As the MySQL Fabric story develop, we have a number of challenges ahead.

Loss-less Fail-over. MySQL 5.7 have extended the support for semi-sync so that transactions that are not replicated to a slave server will not be committed. With this support, we can truly have a loss-less fail-over so that you cannot lose a transaction if a single server fails.

More Fabric-aware connectors. We currently have support for Connector/J, Connector/PHP, and Connector/Python, but one common request is to have support for a Fabric-aware C API. This is both for applications developed using C/C++, but also to add Fabric support to connectors based on the MySQL C API, such as the Perl and Ruby connector.

Multi-Node Fabric Instance. Many have pointed out that the Fabric node is a single point of failure, and it is instead a single node, but if the Fabric node goes down, the system do not stop working. Since the connectors cache the data, they can "run on the cache" for the time it takes for the Fabric node to be brought up again. Procedures being executed will stop, but once the Fabric node is on-line again, execution will resume from where it left off. To ensure that the meta-data (the information about the servers in the farm) is not lost in the event of a machine failure, MySQL Cluster can be used as storage engine, and will then ensure that your meta-data is safe.

There are, however, a few advantages in having support for multiple Fabric nodes:

• The most obvious advantage is that execution can fail-over to another node and there will be no interruption in the execution of procedures. If the fail-over is built-in, you avoid the need for external clusterware to manage several Fabric nodes.
• If you have several Fabric nodes available to deliver data, you improve responsiveness to bursts in meta-data requests. This can happen if you have a large bunch of connectors brought on-line at the same time.
• If you have multiple data centers, having a local version of the data to serve the applications deployed in the same center improve locality of data and avoid an unnecessary round-trip over WAN to fetch some meta-data.
• With several nodes to execute management procedures, you can improve scaling by being able to execute several management procedures in parallel. This would require some solution to avoid that that procedures do no step over each other.

Location Awareness. In deployments spread over several data-centers, the location of all the components suddenly become important. There is no reason for a connector to be directed to a remote server when a local one suffices, but that require some sort of location awareness in the model allowing the location of servers (or other components) to be given.

Extending the model by adding data centers is not enough though. The location of components withing a data center might be important. For example, if a connector is located in a particular rack in the data center, going to a different rack to fetch data might be undesirable. For this reason, the location awareness need to be hierarchical and support several levels, e.g., continent, city, data center, hall, rack, etc.

Multi-Shard Queries. Sharding can improve performance significantly since it split the data horizontally across several machines and each query therefore go directly to the right shard of the data. In some cases, however, you also need to send queries to multiple shards. There are a few reasons for this:

• You do not have the shard key available, so you want to search all servers for some object of interest. This of course affect performance, but in some cases there are few alternatives. Consider, for example, searching for a person given name and address when the database is sharded on the SSN.
• You want to generate a report of several items in the database, for example, find all customers above 50 that have more than 2 cars.
• You want a summary of some statistic over the database, for example, generate a histogram over the age of all your customers.

Session Consistency Guarantees. As Alfranio point out, when you use multiple servers in your farm, and transactions are sent to different servers at different times, it might well be that you write one transaction that goes to the master of a group and then try to read something from the same group. If the write transactions have not reached the server that you read from, then you might get an incorrect result from your transaction. In some cases, this is fine, but in other cases, you have certain guarantees that you want to have on your session. For example, you want to ensure that anything you write will also be available when you read in transactions following the write, you might want to guarantee that multiple reads read later data all the time (called "read monotonicity"), or other forms of guarantees on the result sets you get back from the distributed database. This might require connectors to wait for transactions to reach slaves before reading, but this should be transparent to the application.

This is just a small set of the possibilities for the future, so it is really going to be interesting to see how the MySQL Fabric story develops.

• You can download MySQL Utilities (which includes MySQL Fabric) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/tools/utilities
• You can read MySQL Utilities documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.4/en/index.html
• You can report bugs or request features on http://bugs.mysql.com
• MySQL Forum Fabric, Sharding, HA, Utilities