With the recent release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, I am increasingly being asked about MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication. I find that there are often a number of misconceptions about how semi-synchronous replication really works. I think it is very important to understand what guarantees you actually get with semi-synchronous replication, and what you don’t get.
The first thing to understand is that despite the name, semi-synchronous replication is still asynchronous. Semi-synchronous is actually a pretty bad name, because there is no strong coupling between a commit on the master and a commit on the replicas. To understand why, let’s look at what truly synchronous replication means. In truly synchronous replication, when you commit a transaction, the commit does not complete until all replicas have also committed successfully. …
[Read more]