The staff at Joomla Wired have been working with both Joomla and Mambo Content Management Systems since their creation, throughout our time

We have become aware of some limitations with regards to providing a fail safe solution for the Joomla! database. Therefore if the database server falls over the website shuts down.

Our commitment to our Professional Hosting packages stipulates that our servers run in a mirrored cluster thus allowing us to support our claim of a 99.9% uptime. Therefore if one server falls over the second server kicks in without the website visitors noticing. However with the limitations mentioned above we had to find away of ensuring that Joomla would not fall over in an unlikely event of the database falling over and to make use of the secondary database server.

We were aware that Joomla themselves have a Google Summer of Code project with the aim of allowing Joomla to work with a database fall over script allowing the system to switch over the secondary system. However the project was never completed and thus the works were not released to the community.

So we went about building a solution from scratch that meets our requirements and ensures that you our client do not notice the changes to the Joomla System.

How it works
We built a PHP extension that allowed Joomla to query what the current database server IP address. Our databases are monitored by a third server which runs a database switch script which upon other things it updates the IP address when a problem is detected. The databases are configured to work in a cluster and are aware of each others existence. They are setup to handle the task of ensuring that their records are exact match. Therefore if the primary server falls over the secondary server is completely up to date and will update the primary server's records once the system is up and running again.

As most of the work is carried outside of Joomla our changes to the Joomla System are not noticeable to the end user nor a developer. This also ensures that all of Joomla's functionality works the same as any other Joomla installation and all extensions will work with our installations.

What does this mean about updating Joomla with the security patches? We automatically update our clients Joomla systems ensuring that they still work with our server cluster. Therefore our clients have no need to worry about the updates. For those clients who opt-out of the Auto Update, we will be releasing the update patches through our website as so the client can manually update their system without the worry that they will break the functionality.