Continuent intros Continuent Tungsten

SAN JOSE, USA: Continuent, Inc., a provider of commercial open source solutions for database replication and scale-out, has announced advanced replication for Oracle with its Tungsten Replicator.

Continuent Tungsten is an open source stack consisting of tightly integrated projects that provide database scale-out using commodity hardware. It provides database replication, group communications wrappers, performance testing tools and shared infrastructure required to build workable scale-out solutions. Tungsten also includes sophisticated cluster management based on group communications.

Continuent's Tungsten stack works with any database implementation, and is available in source and binary forms.

The Continuent Tungsten for Oracle is designed to

•  Replicate between Oracle database instances (Express, SE1, SE and EE): maximize database uptime and throughput by replicating the master database to multiple slaves, distributing reads to slaves, and promoting slaves automatically during planned maintenance or when the master fails.
• Provide heterogeneous replication: supply edge application data from core Oracle OLTP server by heterogeneous replication from an Oracle RAC instance to and from MySQL instances and to PostgreSQL, with high fidelity and rapid transfer rates.
• Replicate from Oracle RAC: extend Oracle Standard Edition One (SE1) and Standard Edition (SE) with advanced replication capabilities by using low-cost SE1 for replicas, off-loading reporting and read-only queries to replicas to reduce resource load on an Oracle SE Real Application Cluster (RAC) installation, and using load balancing to distribute queries to read-only copies.

"Scale-out is a very flexible database design approach that works by spreading copies of data across multiple hosts," says Robert Hodges, CTO of Continuent. "Scale-out technologies are fundamental to solving a wide range of important problems such as maintaining high data availability, scaling workloads or performing zero-downtime upgrades. The database scale-out model, which has proven to be very successful within MySQL community, is now available for all Oracle users at reasonable prices."

"Oracle has excellent high-end solutions for data replication (Streams), disaster recovery (DataGuard) and high-end database clustering (RAC). Unfortunately those require expensive Oracle Enterprise Edition licenses and have high administrative complexity, thus putting them out of reach for many mainstream Oracle users," says Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent. "Continuent's goal is to give an open-sourced, easy-to-use replication functionality to all Oracle users, including those running Oracle Express and Standard Editions."