performance

It is possible to use an active - active shared-disk cluster in MySQL in some cases. For doing this you have to fulfill the following requirements:

Transaction performance relates among other things from I/O performance. This means hard disk performance.

Hard disk performance

When you select a hard disk, an important feature to consider is the performance (speed) of the drive. Hard disks come in a wide range of performance capabilities. As is true of many things, one of the best indicators of a drive’s relative performance is its price. An old saying from the automobile-racing industry is appropriate here: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?"

The price for a 160 Gbyte disk will be around USD 15'000. This is still a bit expensive. But the access time is around 0.5 ms (both for reading and writing) which is around 10 times faster than a normal 15'000 rpm SCSI disk! The disk has NO cache because it is a cache itself (according to the supplier. Maybe this will change in the future). And the lifetime of a cell is > 5 mio writes. For the same performance one needs usually an array of around 10 disks. If your database is heavily write-I/O bound you should consider this solution.

Materialised View (MV) is the pre-calculated (materialised) result of a query. Unlike a simple VIEW the result of a Materialised View is stored somewhere, generally in a table. Materialised Views are used when immediate response is needed and the query where the Materialised View bases on would take to long to produce a result. Materialised Views have to be refreshed once in a while. It depends on the requirements how often a Materialised View is refreshed and how actual its content is.