Each of these commands must be run from a system shell on the machine housing the affected node. (You do not have to be physically present at the machine - a remote login shell can be used for this purpose.) You can verify that the cluster is running by starting the MGM management client ndb_mgm on the machine housing the MGM node and issuing the SHOW or ALL STATUS command. To shut down a running cluster, issue the command SHUTDOWN in the MGM client.

MySQL user accounts and privileges are not automatically propagated between different MySQL servers accessing the same MySQL Cluster. Therefore, you must make sure that these are copied between the SQL nodes yourself. This set of Frequently Asked Questions derives from the experience of MySQL's Support and Development groups in handling many inquiries about CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) issues.

MySQL Cluster supports all of the usual MySQL data types, with the exception of those associated with MySQL's spatial extensions. (See Chapter 17, Spatial Extensions.) In addition, there are some differences with regard to indexes when used with NDB tables. Note: MySQL Cluster Disk Data tables (that is, tables created with TABLESPACE ... STORAGE DISK ENGINE=NDBCLUSTER) have only fixed-width rows.

No. Although some specialized commands are used to manage and configure the cluster itself, only standard (My)SQL queries and commands are required for the following operations: Some specialized configuration parameters and files are required to set up a MySQL Cluster - see Section 15.4.4, "Configuration File", for information about these. A few simple commands are used in the MySQL Cluster management client for tasks such as starting and stopping cluster nodes. See Section 15.7.

Cluster is supported in all server binaries in the 5.1 release series for operating systems on which MySQL Cluster is available. See Section 5.2, "mysqld - The MySQL Server". You can determine whether your server has NDB support using either the SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'have_%' or SHOW ENGINES statement. You can also obtain NDB support by compiling MySQL from source, but it is not necessary to do so simply to use MySQL Cluster.

Temporary tables are not supported; a CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE statement using ENGINE=NDB or ENGINE=NDBCLUSTER fails with an error. The only types of user-defined partitioning supported for NDB tables are KEY and LINEAR KEY. (Beginning with MySQL 5.1.12, attempting to create an NDB table using any other partitioning type fails with an error.) Only complete rollbacks for transactions are supported. Partial rollbacks and rollbacks to save points are not supported.

You can import databases into MySQL Cluster much as you would with any other version of MySQL. Other than the limitations mentioned elsewhere in this FAQ and in Section 16.13, "Known Limitations of MySQL Cluster", the only other special requirement is that any tables to be included in the cluster must use the NDB storage engine. This means that the tables must be created with ENGINE=NDB or ENGINE=NDBCLUSTER.

Yes, it's possible to use DNS and DHCP for cluster hosts. However, if your application requires "five nines" availability, we recommend using fixed IP addresses. This is because making communication between Cluster hosts dependent on such services introduces additional points of failure, and the fewer of these, the better. This is a translation of the MySQL Reference Manual that can be found at dev.mysql.com.