MySQL Cluster is a technology providing shared-nothing clustering and auto-sharding for the MySQL database management system. It is designed to provide high availability and high throughput with low latency, while allowing for near linear scalability. MySQL Cluster is implemented through the NDB or NDBCLUSTER storage engine for MySQL ("NDB" stands for Network Database). Architecture MySQL Cluster is designed around a distributed, multi-master ACID compliant architecture with no single point of failure. MySQL Cluster uses automatic sharding (partitioning) to scale out read and write operations on commodity hardware and can be accessed via SQL and Non-SQL (NoSQL) APIs Replication Internally MySQL Cluster uses synchronous replication through a two-phase commit mechanism in order to guarantee that data is written to multiple nodes upon committing the data. (This is in contrast to what is usually referred to as "MySQL Replication", which is .) Two copies (known as replicas) of the data are required to guarantee availability. MySQL Cluster automatically creates “node groups” from the number of replicas and data nodes specified by the user. Updates are synchronously replicated between members of the node group to protect against data loss and support fast failover between nodes. It is also possible to replicate asynchronously between clusters; this is sometimes referred to as "MySQL Cluster Replication" or "geographical replication". This is typically used to replicate clusters between data centers for disaster recovery or to reduce the effects of network latency by locating data physically closer to a set of users. Unlike standard MySQL replication, MySQL Cluster's geographic replication uses optimistic concurrency control and the concept of Epochs to provide a mechanism for conflict detection and resolution, enabling active/active clustering between data centers. Starting with MySQL Cluster 7.2, support for synchronous replication between data centers was supported with the Multi-Site Clustering feature. Horizontal data partitioning (auto-sharding) MySQL Cluster is implemented as a fully distributed multi-master database ensuring updates made by any application or SQL node are instantly available to all of the other nodes accessing the cluster, and each data node can accept write operations. Data within MySQL Cluster (NDB) tables is automatically partitioned across all of the data nodes in the system. This is done based on a hashing algorithm based on the primary key on the table, and is transparent to the end application. Clients can connect to any node in the cluster and have queries automatically access the correct shards needed to satisfy a