Built-in replication isn’t the only way to replicate your data from one server to another, although it probably is the best for most purposes. (In contrast to PostgreSQL, MySQL doesn’t have a wide variety of add-on replication options, probably because built-in replication was added early in the product’s life.)

We’ve brushed elbows with a few of the add-on technologies for MySQL replication, such as Oracle GoldenGate, but we’re really not familiar enough with most of them to write much about them. There are two that we want to mention, however. The first is Percona XtraDB Cluster’s synchronous replication, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 12 because it fits better into a chapter on high availability. The second is Continuent’s Tungsten Replicator (http://code.google.com/p/tungsten-replicator/).