"Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and others, we don't crash EVER! If our service is down for a minute, the reputation of our entire irreversible destruction! "
-Social networking
If You believe the hype, it seems that almost all of the data and the database as a provider of cloud services (DaaS/DBaaS) operate on the availability of 99.999% weight, better known as the nine to five. Heck, Amazon's S3 service premium promises ten nines
While these claims often turn out to be unfounded, you don't need to go to the cloud to achieve using Your own infrastructure. One option that was recently piqued my interest is a product called SchoonerSQL, a MySQL database re-jigged designed for applications that can be experienced only minimal downtime
The dangers of Asynchronous loosely-coupled and Semi-synchronous replication
The schooner was started by building standard and modified MySQL InnoDB storage engine to address some shortcomings. One of the great is how MySQL handles replication. MySQL has support for asynchronous (default) and semi-synchronous replications. MySQL 5.1 introduces the asynchronous replication, while MySQL 5.5 is provided semi-synchronous replication. Therefore, people who require a full synchronization infrastructure should be moved to different solutions like MySQL NDB Clustering, for example.