[wplug] MySQL Mirror/Clustering

[Shane Liesegang]

My company is currently working on an application that will be using a 
database backend. My tendency is towards MySQL, simply because I'm 
familiar with it. However, this app will require at least a few levels of 
redundancy, particularly on the database side. I had seemed to recall that 
it was possible to set up MySQL to mirror its DB on several machines so if 
one went down, another could pick up for it rather easily. A more thorough 
investigation, though, shows that the MySQL clustering product/project is 
not really mature yet.

At this point, I'm considering setting up our data layer to send every 
update query to a list of machines, and make select queries from a random 
machine off the list (or one machine and it's backup if it goes down).

For the MySQL gurus, does this seem like a reasonable kind of setup? Is 
there another easily scriptable/programmable database that might serve our 
purposes better? Has anyone ever set something like this up before?

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Shane J. M. Liesegang
Masters Candidate 2006
Entertainment Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University