In this blog, we’ll look at group replication and how it deals with flow control (FC) and replication lag. 

Overview

In the last few months, we had two main actors in the MySQL ecosystem: ProxySQL and Group-Replication (with the evolution to InnoDB Cluster). 

While I have extensively covered the first, my last serious work on Group Replication dates back to some lab version years past.

Given that Oracle decided to declare it GA, and Percona’s decision to provide some level of Group Replication support, I decided it was time for me to take a look at it again.

We’ve seen a lot of coverage already too many Group Replication topics. There are articles about Group Replication and performance, Group Replication and basic functionalities (or lack of it like automatic node provisioning), Group Replication and ProxySQL, and so on.

But one question kept coming up over and over in my …

Some time ago I wrote this article explaining how to find which node was the Primary Master in a MySQL Group Replication cluster running in Single-Primary Mode.

In the latest release of Group Replication, MySQL 8.0.2 dmr, Jaideep improved the visibility of Group Replication extending the performance_schema tables (see his article).

Thanks to these improvements, it’s now very easy to find which host is acting a Primary-Master. This is the query you can use:

mysql-sql> SELECT MEMBER_HOST as `PRIMARY` 
           FROM performance_schema.replication_group_members 
           WHERE MEMBER_ROLE='PRIMARY';
+---------+
| PRIMARY |
+---------+
| mysql3  |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Recently, my friend Marco Tusa(MySQL Daddy or the Grinch) wrote his first impression on MySQL Group Replication (part of InnoDB Cluster). And his conclusion was not that positive. But when I analyze his setup, I understand that his assumptions were not so right.

Let's try to explain what were the issues and why his test wasn't correct.

Before commenting Marco's tests, I would like to clarify the flow-control implementation in Group Replication:

We designed the flow-control feature in Group Replication as a safety measure for delaying writer nodes when they consistently exceed the write capacity of the Group, so that a large backlog would not make it hard to switch over from a member to another.

Flow-control is …

As you may know by now, MySQL 8.0.2 DMR is out ! \o/

Many features have been added (see Geir Høydalsvik‘s announcement) and of course the replication also brought new features and improvements (see this post from Luís Soares).

But some improvements in the monitoring broke the added sys view used by ProxySQL to monitor the state of a member of the group:

mysql> select * from sys.gr_member_routing_candidate_status;
+------------------+-----------+---------------------+----------------------+
| viable_candidate | read_only | transactions_behind | transactions_to_cert | …

MySQL InnoDB Cluster (or only Group Replication) becomes more and more popular. This solution doesn’t attract only experts anymore. On social medias, forums and other discussions, people are asking me what it the best way to migrate a running environment using traditional asynchronous replication [Master -> Slave(s)] to InnoDB Cluster.

The following procedure is what I’m actually recommending. These steps have for objective to reduce the downtime to the minimum for the database service.

We can divide the procedure in 9 steps:

1. the current situation
2. preparing the future cluster
3. data transfert
4. replication from current system
5. creation of the cluster with a single instance
6. adding instances to the cluster
7. configure the router
8. test phase
9. pointing the application to the new solution

…

A few weeks ago I started experimenting with MySQL InnoDB cluster. As part of the testing, I tried to kill a node to see what happens to the cluster.

The good news is that the cluster is resilient. When the primary node goes missing, the cluster replaces it immediately, and operations continue. This is one of the features of an High Availability system, but this feature alone does not define the usefulness or the robustness of the system. In one of my previous jobs, I worked at testing a commercial HA system and I've learned a few things about what makes a reliable system.

Armed with this knowledge, I did some more experiments with InnoDB Cluster. The attempt from my previous article had no other expectation than seeing operations continue with ease (primary node …

Today I presented MySQL InnoDB Cluster at the Helsinki MySQL User Group.

To demonstrate how easy it’s to deploy a cluster with MySQL Shell and used the prompt that will be part of a future release just because it’s beautiful.

If you also want to see how it looks like, just check the video below:

There were several MongoDB users in the audience and I got only very positive feedback, they were very surprised how easy it’s to deploy a MySQL InnoDB Cluster these days !

InnoDB Cluster was released as GA a few weeks ago. I remember the initial announcement of the product at OOW 2016, promising a seamless solution for replication and high availability with great ease of use. I was a bit disappointed to see that, at GA release time, the InnoDB Cluster is a patchwork of three separate products (Group Replication, MySQL Router, MySQL Shell) which the users have to collect and install separately.

Given this situation, I was very pleased when Matthew Lord published Docker-InnoDB-Cluster, an image for Docker that contains everything you need to get the system up and running. The …

ProxySQL is the leader in proxy and load balancing solution for MySQL. It has great features like query caching, multiplexing, mirroring, read/write splitting, routing, etc… The latest enhancement in ProxySQL is the native support of MySQL Group Replication. No more need to use an external script within the scheduler like I explained in this previous post.

This implementation supports Groups in Single-Primary and in Multi-Primary mode. It is even possible to setup a Multi-Primary Group but dedicate writes on only one member.

René, the main developer of ProxySQL, went even further. For example in a 7 nodes clusters (Group …

Yesterday I was invited to speak at the “Jeudis du Libre” in Mons.

The location was very special as it was in one auditorium of Polytech, the oldest university in the city of Mons.

I presented in French two very hot topics in the MySQL ecosystem:

• MySQL InnoDB Cluster
• MySQL as Document Store with JSON datatype & X plugin

Those are very new technologies illustrating MySQL’s innovation. And of course there is much more to come with MySQL 8 !

Here are the slides if you are interested:

Jeudis du Libre – MySQL InnoDB Cluster from Frederic Descamps

…