New Tungsten Software Releases for MySQL and PostgreSQL

I would like to announce a couple of new Tungsten versions available for your database clustering enjoyment.  As most readers of this blog are aware, Tungsten allows users to create highly available data services that include replicated copies, distributed management, and application connectivity using unaltered open source databases.   We are continually improving the software and have a raft of new features coming out this year.  

First, there is a new Tungsten 1.2.3 maintenance release available in both commercial as well as open source editions.  You can get access to the commercial version on the Continuent website, while the open source version is available on SourceForge. 

 The Tungsten 1.2.3 release focuses on improvements for MySQL users including the following:

• Transparent session consistency for multi-tenant applications.  This allows applications that follow some simple conventions like sharding tenant data by database to get automatic read scaling to slaves without making code changes.
• A greatly improved script for purging history on Tungsten Replicator. 
• Fixes to binlog extraction to handle enum and set data types correctly. 

By far the biggest improvement in this release is Tungsten product documentation, including major rewrites for the guides covering management and connectivity.  Even the Release Notes are better.  If you want to find out how Tungsten works, start with the new Tungsten Concepts and Administration Guide. 

Second, there's a new Tungsten 1.3 release coming out soon.  Commercial versions are already in use at selected customer sites, and you can build the open source version by downloading code from SVN on SourceForge. 

The Tungsten 1.3 release sports major feature additions in the following areas: 

• A new replicator architecture that allows you to manage non-Tungsten replication and also to configure very flexible replication flows to use multi-core systems more effectively and implement complex replication topologies.  The core processing loop for replication can now cycle through 700,000 events per second on my laptop--it's really quick. 
• Much improved support for PostgreSQL warm standby clustering as well as provisional management of new PostgreSQL 9 features like streaming replication and hot standby.  
• Replication support for just about everything in the MySQL binlog:  large transactions, unsigned characters, session variables, various permutations of character sets and binary data, and ability to download binlog files through the MySQL client protocol.  If you can put it in the binlog we can replicate it.  

We also have provisional support for Drizzle thanks to Markus Ericsson, plus a raft of other improvements.  This has been a huge amount of work all around, so I hope you'll enjoy the results.

P.s., Contact Continuent if you want to be a beta test site for Tungsten 1.3.