Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings gains high availability for shipboard management operations with MySQL Enterprise Edition.
Introduction & Background
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: NCLH) is a leading global cruise company that operates Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, and Regent Seven Seas Cruises. With a combined fleet of 34 ships and more than 71,000 berths, NCLH offers itineraries to approximately 700 destinations worldwide. NCLH expects to add 13 additional ships across its three brands through 2036, which will add over 38,400 berths to its fleet.
Business Challenges & Goals
In 2025 NCLH decided that all new ships, starting with the Norwegian Aqua launched in April 2025, would be equipped with Otalio, a shipboard property management system (SPMS) fully integrated with point of sales and other revenue-facing applications such as spa, excursions, and fine dining.
NCLH was using MySQL Community Edition but was looking for a more robust solution for an enterprise grade database back end. NCLH sought a fail-safe high availability database with zero downtime to ensure that Otalio operates at maximum revenue-generating performance on Norwegian Aqua and on every new ship launched in the future.
Business Results & Metrics
In equipping Norwegian Aqua with InnoDB Cluster, consisting of three MySQL Enterprise Edition server instances, NCLH achieved its main objective: high availability for Otalio to enhance its onboard operations, particularly for guest services and crew management. “InnoDB cluster is a huge benefit to our tier-one system. Any downtime during a cruise would result in huge revenue loss,” explained Shajay Das.
InnoDB’s fault tolerance to seamlessly handle any issue impacting availability has brought peace of mind to the IT operations team for whom Norwegian Aqua, the world’s most spacious cruise ship, is a highly visible test bed for its new system. Any fear of outage—be it by force majeure or power failure— was allayed during a PoC which demonstrated how, through the combination of MySQL Group Replication and MySQL Router, a single-line command can bring up a 3-node MySQL cluster and restore the primary node, even after a system failure.
Taking advantage of the option to predefine InnoDB’s nodes, NCLH configured node 3 as a read-only replica, thereby directly connecting reporting and analysis tools such as Tableau to read data without taxing the primary database at all.
And when the ship is in port and passenger excursion bookings and other events create high-concurrency workloads, MySQL Thread Pool provides automatic scaling through a router mechanism consistently connected to the primary database. “One of the great things about MySQL is its scalability and the router configuration that gives us high availability,” commented Shajay Das.
The ship is further protected from downtime or data loss by very specific RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) guidelines that require a full daily backup and incremental backups every 15 minutes, orchestrated by MySQL Enterprise Backup.
Since cruise ship operations are governed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), NCLH can rest assured that MySQL Enterprise Backup proves through screenshots and job history that backups have taken place, while MySQL Enterprise Audit makes traceable every DDL (Data Definition Language) execution.
In addition, the passenger and crew information generated in Otalio is unexposed thanks to MySQL Enterprise Transparent Data Encryption, preventing data breaches and meeting SOX regulatory requirements.
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings collaborated closely with MySQL Premier Support to make Norwegian Aqua’s maiden voyage a success, to be followed by multiple implementations in the years to come. “This is Norwegian Aqua’s first revenue cruise, and we are monitoring performance by the minute. There have been no issues, 100% successful from database point of view, which is a great achievement! MySQL is exactly working as intended,” said Shajay Das.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
For the primary shipside database, high availability was vital. The customer ran a step-by-step proof of concept with Percona and with MySQL Enterprise Edition, testing multiple scenarios including extreme cases where the entire onboard data center might go down. It found MySQL Router, automatically rerouting traffic to the primary node, to be the better system and imperative for ensuring constant up time of shipboard operations.
In addition, starting with assistance during the proof of concept, it considered MySQL Premier Support to be better than the alternatives reviewed.
“MySQL support teams have been outstanding in optimizing the performance of this primary shipside database—knowledgeable, helpful, always available for us,” said Shajay Das.
Next Steps
NCLH, very satisfied with the success of MySQL Enterprise Edition on board Norwegian Aqua, will be implementing InnoDB Cluster on each new ship launched in the coming years.
At the same time, the company is reviewing options for replacing the systems currently installed across the rest of its fleet.