Tungsten Clustering 6.0 and Tungsten Replicator 6.0 are now available!

Continuent is very pleased and excited to announce that the new Tungsten Clustering 6.0 and Tungsten Replicator 6.0 are now available for download by our customers.

The 6.0 release is the culmination of over a year's work within our clustering product in order to create a new type of Active/Active solution. This is not a replacement for what we called the multi-site active/active (MSAA) clustering functionality in earlier releases.

The composite active/active (CAA) clustering allows for multiple clusters, in multiple locations, to be linked together into a single composite cluster. Because it's a composite cluster, you gain all of the functionality that's already available in a cluster, such as:

• High availability
• Failover
• Automated recovery
• Read-write split
• Maintenance without downtime

But it's now applied to the composite environment so this functionality works across sites and multiple clusters.

The key component to making this happen was for us to combine the technology used in the MSAA iteration into a single, managed, project. Our MSAA deployment relies on using the core clustering product with a separate Tungsten Replicator product deployment to provide cross-site replication.

We've embedded the cross-site replication into the cluster, and then expanded the management layer provided by the Tungsten Manager so that we can monitor and control the cross replicators and entire composite cluster from a single location.

With CAA, a multi-primary cluster spread across multiple sites now has:

• Failover and recovery between sites
• Single unified view of the composite cluster
• Single unified composite cluster
• Single unified replication status across the cluster
• Tungsten Connector is aware of the composite structure

The result is a much simpler multi-primary cluster solution, all manageable with our cctrl command-line client.

As part of the process, we've made some other minor changes:

• Package has been renamed to tungsten-clustering to match the product name we've been using.
• Support for Java 7 has been dropped. You must use at least Java 8 for 6.0 and higher.
• We have upgrade support for moving directly from both the 4.x and 5.x versions of Tungsten Clustering, and we even have a script that will help with the process.

Tungsten Replicator 6.0

We've also made some improvements to our Tungsten Replicator 6.0. Some of these are under the hood again in preparation for new products and functionality, but some of it builds on the technology and capability we already have. In particular, we've added:

• Re-introduction of the support for writing data into PostgreSQL.
• Significant expansion of the Kafka applier to provide more detailed information in the messages, including whole transaction information so that you can verify message states.
• Support for replicating data from MySQL and Oracle databases that don’t have explicit database primary keys to analytics targets.
• Support for larger server IDs for MySQL sources to allow the replicator to work better within some cloud deployments.

Always, in both products, the releases contain a few fixes for bugs and tweaks.

You can read the full release notes here:

https://docs.continuent.com/tungsten-clustering-6.0/release-notes-6-0-0.html

https://docs.continuent.com/tungsten-replicator-6.0/release-notes-6-0-0.html

To say that Continuent as a team is really excited about this new release is an understatement!

If you have any questions or would like to discuss upgrades with the support team, please use the support portal to submit a request.