What is a conflict?

Readers of this blog know that one of my favorite tools, Tungsten Replicator, can easily create multi-master replication topologies, such as all-masters, star, fan-in. While this is good news for system designers and ambitious DBAs, it also brings some inconvenience. When you allow updates to happen in more than one master, you risk having conflicts. You may have heard this term before. For the sake of clarity, let's define what conflicts are, before analyzing each case in detail.

You have a conflict when several sources (masters) update concurrently the same data in asynchronous replication.

It's important to stress that this happens with asynchronous replication. In a truly synchronous cluster, where all data is kept consistent through

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I have been working with MySQL replication for quite a while. I have dealt with simple replication setups and I have experimented with complex ones. Five years ago I wrote an article about advanced MySQL replication, which was mostly a dream on what you could do with imagination and skill, but the matter from that article is still not even remotely ready for production. Yet, since that article, I have been approached by dozens of people who wanted to know how to make the multiple master dream become reality. To all of them, I had to say, "sorry, this is just a proof of concept.Come back in a few years, it may become possible". It still isn't.
Despite its latest great technological advance, MySQL native replication is is very poor of topologies. What you can do with MySQL native
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Three unrelated facts reminded me of a popular article about MySQL replication that I wrote long time ago.

• A reader of that article told me that he used information I wrote to set up a circular replication in production, and it is still working!
• A new page on circular replication in MySQL manual was just published.
• During yesterday's meetup in New York, an attendee asked advice about broken replication in a circular scheme,

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There is a lot of information out there about how to setup circular replication but nothing about how to recover it when all else fails. This article will cover a quick and easy method I use. Depending on the size of your database and the interconnects between servers this method may not be suitable due to the need to copy all replicated databases from one good server to all other servers in the replication circle which requires a certain amount of down time respectively.

OK, so one server or more is showing Slave_IO_Running and/or Slave_SQL_Running as No and there is some error about a failed query when you run "show slave status;" and no amount of effort to fix it is working. First DO NOT PANIC. It is broken, OK, tell yourself that and realise that trying to fix something when you are in a panicked state is only

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