[amluto]

> This is an area where MySQL is so significantly better than Postgres (because so many large Internet companies use MySQL) that it surprises me people aren't more unhappy with the state of things.

I’m not sure precisely what you mean by “HA”, but, in my experience, out-of-the-box support for the most basic replication setup in MySQL is pretty bad. Just to rattle off a few examples:

Adding a replica involves using mysqldump, which is, to put it charitably, not a very good program. And the tools that consume its output are even worse!

There is nothing that shops with MySQL that can help verify that a replica is in sync with its primary.

Want to use GTID (which is the recommended mode and is more or less mandatory for a reasonable HA setup)? Prepare for poor docs. Also prepare for the complete inability of anyone’s managed offering to sync to an existing replica set via mysqldump’s output. RDS will reject the output due to rather fundamental permission issue, and the recommended (documented!) workaround is simply incorrect. It’s not clear that RDS can do it right. At least Azure sort of documents that one can manually real and modify the mysqldump output and then issue a manual API call (involving the directives that you manually removed from the dump) to set the GTID state.

Want point-in-time recovery? While the replication protocol supports it, there is no first-party tooling. Even just archiving the replication logs is barely supported. Postgres makes it a bit awkward, but at least the mechanisms are supported out of the box.

But maybe the new-ish cluster support actually works well one it’s set up as long as you don’t try to add managed RDS-style nodes?

[evanelias]

> Adding a replica involves using mysqldump

That's one path, but it is not the only way, and never has been.

MySQL 8.0.17 (released nearly 5 years ago!) added support for physical (binary) copy using the CLONE plugin. And MySQL Shell added logical dump/reload capabilities in 8.0.21, nearly 4 years ago.

Third-party solutions for both physical and logical copy have long been available, e.g. xtrabackup and mydumper, respectively.

And there was always the "shut down the server and copy the files" offline approach in a pinch.

[amluto]

CLONE is indeed nifty. But why is it a plugin? And who don’t any of the major hosted services support it? (Or do they? The ones I checked don’t document any support.)

I wouldn’t call xtrabackup or mydumper an out-of-the-box solution.

[evanelias]

What's wrong with CLONE being a MySQL plugin? I mean a good chunk of this page is people praising Postgres for its plugins.

As for support in hosted cloud providers, that's a question for the cloud providers, no one else can answer this. But my best guess would be because they want you to use their in-house data management offerings, snapshot functionality, etc instead of porting MySQL's solution into the security restrictions of their managed environment.

Yes, xtrabackup and mydumper are third-party tools, as I noted. If you needed something out-of-the-box prior to CLONE, the paid MySQL Enterprise Edition has always included a first-party solution (MySQL Enterprise Backup, often abbreviated as MEB). Meanwhile Community Edition users often gravitated to Percona's xtrabackup instead as a similar FOSS equivalent, despite not being a first-party / out-of-the-box tool.