Continuent, Inc., a provider of continuous data availability and performance solutions, announced it is rolling out new capabilities to support advanced hot standby and streaming replication features on PostgreSQL databases. The offering, Continuent Tungsten, leverages multiple separate PostgreSQL databases to create highly available data services that offer the ease-of-management and processing throughput.
"This our second release for PostgreSQL, but first the one with with high availability and scalability," Eero Teerikorpi, CEO for Continuent, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The earlier version of Tungsten for PostgreSQL 8.x provided WAL shipping based warm standby high availability, but the upcoming PostgreSQL with streaming replication and hot standby allows us to provide much higher availability and also opens the slaves up for read traffic (scale out)."
Tungsten for PostgreSQL adds advanced SQL routing and management to existing point-in-time-recover/warm standby, as well as PostgreSQL 9 log streaming and hot standby capabilities. Set-up details are handled automatically as part of cluster configuration, sparing users an often-complex configuration path.
"PostgreSQL does not have built-in high availability," Teerikorpi explains. "It offers some tools, such as WAL shipping and streaming replication, which allows DIY database admins to create various level high availability implementations. But these are laborious to build and maintain."
Tungsten also includes a single management interface helps eliminate application downtime due to database failures or scheduled database maintenance. Tungsten integrated management offers an interface with built-in, automatic failover and simple procedures for on-line maintenance that works identically across different versions of PostgreSQL.
Continuent also offers a similar solution available for MySQL, based on the same technology, Teerikorpi says. "There is similar, actually a bit more advanced solution for MySQL. Tungsten offers, in principal, same services for both PostgreSQL and MySQL, but since we have access to MySQL transaction log (which is still missing from PostgreSQL), that allows us offer more services, such as zero-downtime upgrade and multi-master replication, for MySQL."
Continuent Tungsten for PostgreSQL builds on the rock-solid reliability of PostgreSQL as well as advanced replication capabilities arriving with PostgreSQL 9. Tungsten clusters allow a wide range of businesses to scale data processing efficiently and economically on PostgreSQL.
Tungsten/Postgres also offers an alternative to commercial databases with similar capabilities, such as Oracle Grid/RAC, Teerikorpi points out. "Tungsten and PostgreSQL or MySQL favorably competes against commercial solutions," he says. Naturally Oracle RAC/Grid are very good - and very expensive - solutions. There are cases that they are better solution than Continuent Tungsten, but any customer considering TCO should always check the open source based lower cost solutions first."
That's because Tungsten's key competitive element "is the inherent low cost of open source based solutions," Teerikorpi adds. "Continuent Tungsten also has some features, for example SaaS vendors, that exceeds those available in commercial solutions. Also we drive our solutions to be very powerful, yet very simple to use, thus lowering the entry barrier to implement complex database cluster topologies using low cost open source databases."
For more information about Continuent Tungsten, go here.