Distributed Database Services?

Question

I'm working on a database-driven web service with clients in the US and Australia. We're currently hosted in the US, however our Australian clients are experiencing lag. The lag is primarily due to the fact that the pages launch AJAX queries which require some db work to be done on our database in the US and these take a while to perform a round trip.

Ideally, we're looking for some kind of distributed database system which replicates our main US database in Australia (and possibly other locations if we choose to expand later on).

Does anyone have any suggestions for services which offer something like this? Something like a CDN (CacheFly etc), which is web-based, simple to set up etc but for databases instead of static files.

Ideally it would be completely transparent to the application and abstract away all the distributed database management, syncs etc.

Answer 1

Without knowning the requirements it's hard to say...

You could set up master-slave replication (a couple of DBs support this) and read from the slaves located in Australia. The writes still has to go to US buth if it's rare that might no be an issue. But note that the slaves are going to be out-of-sync, which could be an issue.

If you need fast writes and synced data I don't see how you could abstract away the distributed nature of the database from your application. This kind of transparency will result in slow response time, which is the thing you trying to avoid.

For example in the M-S replication case you could read from the master after an update but you cannot do this without building this logic into your app, which breaks transparency.

CDN for databases? Don't really know, probably amazon, maybe some mongodb hosters...