The data driving mission-critical business applications is growing explosively. It's getting harder for IT managers to meet the accelerating demands for service availability, data integrity and performance scalability they need from their database deployments. This white paper provides a high-level discussion of MySQL high-availability alternatives. It analyzes the range of asynchronous (MySQL 5.1), semi-synchronous (MySQL 5.5) and fully synchronous (SchoonerSQL) replication solutions. The alternatives are compared in terms of what they can offer toward better downtime, data integrity, performance, scalability and administrative ease.