I’m one of the people who don’t believe replication is the worst thing since bad hair day was invented. Flawed? Absolutely! But used in the right situation and catered for in setup and application, it can take you quite far!
Being at the peak of the “scalability hype”, where everyone pretends to be a mini-livejournal or flickr , the vast amount of companies of a more humble size out there is often forgotten about. The type of companies that easily get away with a decent master and a slave or two hanging off of it, and most likely will for a very long time to come.
So, why is it flawed? My major beef with it is that it’s not self-healing. Sure, you can monitor, script and re-jig things to a certain extent. But this is why I was thrilled when read the MySQL Forge suggestions for Google Summer of Code. One of the suggestions is to enable self-healing replication using components, or at least concepts, from maatkit and Google’s MMRM.
Interesting! While I can’t see it become completely fool proof, I’m sure it would help in the majority of scenarios I’ve seen where replication has broken.
As the linked forum post says, it is a bit of a shame that the tools to make this has been conceived by people outside of MySQL when it really should have been a part of the server’s implementation a long time ago!
Let’s just hope someone talented with some spare time steps up to the challenge!
