When tasked with building a huge and complex database application, it is valuable to have already spent half your life doing exactly that. Because then, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, you can simply cast your mind back to how you solved it last time.

Having said that, multi-master replication still poses problems. Having said that, we're not running a bank here. We can say the order of transactions is not guaranteed. The detail lines are in a different order in Japan as compared to the Netherlands? Doesn't matter. As long as they're all present and correct, and the ordering isn't too badly screwed up (minutes matter; seconds don't), we can get away with it. It's a bit annoying that we need an extra field (the original server number) to guarantee uniqueness on some tables, but that's life.

And for the tables that need to be centrally controlled, well, we centrally control those ones. Makes up 0.01% of transactions and 0.0001% of database operations. No biggie.

Look for it on a website near you, probably around September. I can't divulge the details just yet, but don't worry, you'll know it when you see it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:30 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)