Tungsten Replicator Beta-3 Is Available

Our fiendish plot to provide advanced open source replication for MySQL and Oracle took another step forward yesterday. The Tungsten Replicator beta-3 build is available for download on our Forge site. This build is fully open source. Tungsten Replicator provides heterogeneous replication from MySQL to Oracle, seamless failover from a master to one of several slaves, event checksums, event filtering hooks, and a number of other useful replication features for MySQL and Oracle previously not offered outside of commercial products.

The beta-3 build has a number of important improvements:

• MySQL 5.1 row replication is largely working. We are still seeing problems with datetime and timestamp replication but most other datatypes work.
  
• The state machine model used by the replicator has been upgraded substantially. State transitions are processed cleanly and a number of race conditions have been eliminated.
• You can now control master/slave failover remotely without any need to change local properties files. Planned failover passes our current tests, which means it's time to write new ones.
  
• Multiple replicators can read and write from the same database. This is a prerequisite for fan-in and circular replication.
  
• Numerous other bug fixes and small improvements are in the build.
  

For a full list of the build contents, read the Forge release notes or check the JIRA change log.

Our next build, beta-4, is scheduled for 5 January. It will tackle a number of key issues including corner cases for unplanned failure, scheduled table checksums, and heartbeat events. Plus we will continue to fix bugs and improve overall usability. Build contents are shown in the JIRA roadmap, a feature that delights the inner pointy-haired boss in all of us.

Please visit our community website and take the replicator out for a spin. It's improving quite rapidly. We take your feedback quite seriously--any reasonable request for capabilities will be considered and implemented if feasible.

In my next posts I will describe two key capabilities of Tungsten Replicator in more detail: replicating from MySQL to Oracle and filtering events. Stay tuned!