Replication has been used for a long time to provide high availability. However the traditional position-based replication has a serious drawback: a same transaction will never have the same position on two different servers. Reconfiguring replication is then difficult and error-prone, which is bad when you want to make failovers as graceful and reliable as possible.

Enter MySQL 5.6 and Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs): a transaction is guaranteed to have the same identifiers across all servers of a given replication topology. This opens up new ways to handle failover, for instance when used in combination with Oracle's MySQL Utilities.

But are GTIDs ready for production usage? How do you set up GTIDs and the MySQL Utilities to provide high availability and automatic failover to your replication cluster? What are the limitations of the MySQL Utilities? How do they compare to existing tools, for instance with MHA which is a robust and widely used tool?

Come to this session to get a sense of the benefits and challenges of the high-availability solutions available with MySQL 5.6.