Apologies for a slight tangent, but if you <i>really</i> need SQL's structure <i>and</i> you can't shard the data to avoid scaling issues, please let me know what kind of system you are running because it IMHO has to be pretty weird.<p>Even in these cases, there are always other potential options, for instance using query playback with a combination less frequent FS or blockstore layer provided snapshot functionality.<p>In practice, in my own experience, generally when people get an SQL based database to a huge size the often greater issue is that someone has a huge mess of bad application code relying completely on the current database configuration that is not time or cost-feasible to modify.
(shameless plug here)<p>Galera doesn't come out of the box with a secure SST option. SST, or state snapshot transfer, is how it bootstraps a new/failed node to get it close enough to continue with regular Galera replication. If you're running on a public cloud, you might care about secured SST communication. I wrote a drop-in secure rsync SST option, based on socat, that uses SSL encryption to seamlessly secure that traffic. Not perfect by any means, but it works without any futzing around.<p><a href="https://github.com/tobz/galera-secure-rsync" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tobz/galera-secure-rsync</a>
What I want to know is how people deal with innodb's dirty horrible secret - how ibdata can grow to infinite massive sizes and can never be reduced, ever. Regardless if you are using "file per table".<p>It is a ten year old bug [1] never addressed, no tools ever made to optimize it, and the larger your data, the sooner it will come to bite you. Doesn't matter if you are using mysql, percona or mariadb.<p>[1] <a href="http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=1341" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=1341</a>
Why MariaDB+Galera vs. MySQL Cluster?
I read the political decision of Maria being more robust and non-Oracle, but was MySQL Cluster considered? And if not, why?