Server bottlenecks and failures are a fact of life in any database deployment, but they don't have to bring everything to a halt. This practical book explains replication, cluster, and monitoring features that can help protect your MySQL system from outages, whether it's running on hardware, virtual machines, or in the cloud. Written by engineers who designed many of the tools covered, this book reveals undocumented or hard-to-find aspects of MySQL reliability and high availability - knowledge that's essential for any organization using this database system. This second edition describes extensive changes to MySQL tools. Versions up to 5.5 are covered, along with several 5.6 features. Learn replication fundamentals, including use of the binary log and MySQL Replicant Library Handle failing components through redundancy Scale out to manage read-load increases, and use data sharding to handle large databases and write-load increases Store and replicate data on individual nodes with MySQL Cluster Monitor database activity and performance, and major operating system parameters Keep track of masters and slaves, and deal with failures and restarts, corruption, and other incidents Examine tools including MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Utilities, and GTIDs