The bulk of the book is dedicated to MySQL Cluster, with shorter sections on:

• MySQL replication
• shared storage
• block level replication
• performance tuning

The recipes are clear and well explained, based on a CentOS distribution, and it seems any technically skilled person could follow them without issues.

What’s lacking are some design aspects. Based on this material, one probably wouldn’t be able to decide what the best high availability architecture is for a given problem. Actually, one may even be tempted to think MySQL Cluster is the best fit for most scenarios, given the percentage of the book dedicated to it. Nevertheless, there’s a section about Cluster limitations and potential problems, so the cautious reader won’t be tempted to choose this solution for every new project.

I also found that some important considerations regarding replication are missing.
The reader is instructed to rely on Seconds_Behind_Master alone to monitor replication, and there’s no mention to the situations that can cause as slave to go out of sync, nor of a process to fix this problem.

However, this book is a useful addition to any MySQL practitioner’s library, provided you don’t expect to rely only on it to design and deploy your MySQL based highly available services.

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