MySQL Fabric is a new framework that adds High Availability (HA) and/or scaling-out for MySQL. It is built around an extensible framework for managing farms of MySQL Servers. Currently two features have been implemented – High Availability and scaling out using data sharding. Either of these features can be used in isolation or in combination.

High Availability is built on top of MySQL Replication - with all of the MySQL Servers within a HA Group containing the same data. Should the master within the HA Group fail, MySQL Fabric will automatically promote one of the slaves to be the new master and the 'Fabric-aware' connectors will update their routing accordingly.

Scale out is achieved by splitting the rows from a table into multiple shards where each shard is stored by a HA Group. As with HA, it is the role of the Fabric-aware MySQL connector to make sure that queries and transactions are routed to the correct server (note that this means that there is no need for a proxy layer which would add complexity and latency).

This sessions will introduce you to the theory behind MySQL Fabric and then demonstrate how to use it - both from a DBA and a developer's perspective.