MySQL High Availability, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Replication Deep Dive

A knock on his door drew Joel’s attention away from reading his email. He wasn’t surprised to see Mr. Summerson standing in his doorway.

“Yes, sir?”

“I am getting a little concerned about all this replication stuff we’ve got now. I’d like you to do some research into what we need to do to improve our knowledge of how it all works. I want you to put together a document explaining not only the current configuration, but also troubleshooting ideas with specific details on what to do when things go wrong and what makes it tick.”

Joel was expecting such a task. He, too, was starting to be concerned that he needed to know more about replication. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

“Great. Take your time on this one. I want to get it right.”

Joel nodded as his boss walked away. He sighed and gathered his favorite MySQL books together. He needed to do some reading on the finer points of replication.

Previous chapters introduced the basics of configuring and deploying replication to keep your site up and available, but to understand replication’s potential pitfalls and how to use it effectively, you should know something about its operation and the kinds of information it uses to accomplish its tasks. This is the goal of this chapter. We will cover a lot of ground, including:

• How to promote slaves to masters more robustly

• Tips for avoiding corrupted databases after a crash

• Multisource replication

• Row-based replication

• Global transaction identifiers

• Multithreaded replication ...