What's Next for Tungsten Replicator

As Giuseppe Maxia recently posted we released Tungsten Replicator 2.0.4 this week.  It has a raft of bug fixes and new features of which one-line installations are the single biggest improvement.  I set up replicators dozens of times a day and having a single command for standard cluster topologies is a huge step forward.  Kudos to Jeff Mace for getting this nailed down.

So what's next?  You can get see what we are up to in general by looking at our issues list.  We cannot do everything at once, but here are the current priorities for Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5.

• Parallel replication speed and robustness.  I'm currently working on eliminating choke points in performance (like this one) as well as eliminating corner cases that cause the replicator to require manual intervention, such as aging out logs that are still needed by slaves.  
• Multi-master replication.  This includes better support for system of record architectures, many masters to one slave, and replication between the same databases on different sites.  Stephane Giron nailed a key MyISAM multi-master bug for the last release.  We will continue to polish this as we work through our current projects.   
• Better installations for more types of databases.  Jeff recently hacked in support for PostgreSQL as well as Oracle slaves, and we are contemplating addition of MongoDB support.  Heterogeneous replication is getting simpler to set up.  
• Filter usability.  Giuseppe has a list of improvements for filters, which are one of the most powerful Tungsten Replicator features but not as easy for non-developers to use as we would like.  Better installation support is first on the list followed by ability to load and unload dynamically.  
• Data warehouse loading.  We have a design for fast data warehouse loading that I hope we'll be able to implement in the next few weeks.  Linas Virbalas has also been working on this problem along with a number of other heterogeneous projects for customers.  

This is a lot of work and not everything will necessarily be finished when 2.0.5 goes out.  However, I hope we'll make progress on all of them.  In case you are wondering how we pick things, replicator development is largely driven by customer projects.   If you have something you need in the replicator, please contact Continuent.

After this build we will... Er, let's get 2.0.5 done first.  Suffice it to say we have a long list of useful and interesting features to discuss in future blog articles.