Our business at Continuent is development of database clusters with highly simplified management and the ability to be operated unattended for prolonged periods of time. As part of our Tungsten Clustering product we developed an extensible, low-latency, fault-tolerant management framework for database clusters built around a core of group communications and business rules. We have found that our system is easy to maintain and to extend. For example, an extension to switch virtual IP addresses in the event of a database node failure was implemented in an afternoon as a set of two rules and a single bash script. In our talk we will cover the following:
* Basic architecture of a rules-based management framework for databases
* Introduction to business rules, with code examples showing how they work to repair problems ranging from simple process failures to network partitions
* A quick demo of business rules in operation.
* Finally, some thoughts on the benefits of the approach and our experiences (good and bad) with autonomic management of database clusters.
This is an approach to management that we believe will be of interest to anyone who cares about keeping important data highly available as well anyone interested in learning about rules technology.