Overview The Skinny

Part of the power of Tungsten Clustering for MySQL / MariaDB is its intelligent MySQL Proxy, known as the Tungsten Connector. The Tungsten Connector has built-in read-write splitting capabilities, and it is also possible to configure different algorithms which select the appropriate slave (i.e. Round-Robin or Lowest-Latency).

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

How do we best share the load between read-only slaves? Currently, there appears to be an imbalance, with most of the read-only queries reaching just one slave. What may we do to improve this situation?

This customer noticed that a couple of long …

The biggest concern with a slave is to ensure your data is consistent with the master! End of story!

3 of the biggest things I see when dealing with out-of-sync slaves:

1. Many users do not use the --read-only option on their slaves.
2. Some of those who do often have numerous users with SUPER who can still perform writes.
3. Many users simply use --slave-skip-errors=… to avoid common errors.

Of course, if you have a slave, definitely use the --read-only option.

However, SUPER users can still write on slaves with --read-only, so blindly granting SUPER to all users just to save a little time when creating users won’t help. I’d suggest to use SUPER as sparingly as possible (not to mention it’s good for security also).

And the use of --slave-skip-errors=… is generally just a quick fix to avoid errors on the slave, but a sure fire way to end up with inconsistent …

Replication enables data from one MySQL server to be replicated on one or more other MySQL servers. Replication is mostly used as scale-out solution. In such a solution, all writes and updates take place on the master server, while reads take place on one or more slaves. This model is actually known as master-slave replication and this is the kind of replication that I will be setting up in this post.