On a recent consulting engagement, the PSCE team were charged with what can be considered a fairly common task of synchronising tables between master and slave in MySQL Replication. On this occasion the  schema contained both foreign key constraints and triggers, this post describes how we avoided the potential problems related to such an operation.

The process to synchronise tables in MySQL is to first identify the differences between tables and then execute queries which bring those tables into a consistent state. The first part of the process can be handled by the pt-table-checksum tool, which steps through the table analysing sets of rows (chunks) and recording a checksum value. Then taking advantage of replication, the same process occurs on each of the slaves and the checksums can then be compared. Once the entire table has been processed, a second tool pt-table-sync can be used …