In a MySQL master-slave high availability (HA) setup, it is important to continuously monitor the health of the master and slave servers so you can detect potential issues and take corrective actions. In this blog post, we explain some basic health checks you can do on your MySQL master and slave nodes to ensure your setup is healthy. The monitoring program or script must alert the high availability framework in case any of the health checks fails, enabling the high availability framework to take corrective actions in order to ensure service availability.

MySQL Master Server Health Checks

We recommended that your MySQL master monitoring program or scripts runs at frequent intervals. Assuming that the monitoring script is running on the same server as your …

In a MySQL 5.7 master-slave setup that uses the default semisynchronous replication setting for rpl_semi_sync_master_wait_point, a crash of the master and failover to the slave is considered to be lossless. However, when the crashed master comes back, you may find that it has transactions that are not present in the current master (which was previously a slave). This behavior may be puzzling, given that semisynchronous replication is supposed to be lossless, but this is actually an expected behavior in MySQL. Why exactly this happens is explained in full detail in the …

By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

We call this approach a ‘Rolling Index Creation’ - if you have a MySQL master-slave replica set, you can create the index one node at a time in a rolling fashion. You should create the index only on the slave nodes so the master’s …

AWS is the #1 cloud provider for open-source database hosting, and the go-to cloud for MySQL deployments. As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, it’s important to get in front of performance issues, such as high latency, low throughput, and replication lag with higher distances between your users and cloud infrastructure. While many AWS users default to their managed database solution, Amazon RDS, there are alternatives available that can improve your MySQL performance on AWS through advanced customization options and unlimited EC2 instance type support. ScaleGrid offers a compelling alternative to hosting MySQL on AWS that offers better performance, more control, and no cloud vendor lock-in and the same price as Amazon RDS. In this post, we compare the performance of MySQL Amazon RDS …

Are you looking to get started with the world’s most popular open-source database, and wondering how you should setup your MySQL hosting? So many default to Amazon RDS, when MySQL performs exceptionally well on Azure Cloud. While Microsoft Azure does offer a managed solution, Azure Database, the solution has some major limitations you should know about before migrating your MySQL deployments. In this post, we outline the best way to host MySQL on Azure, including managed solutions, instance types, high availability replication, backup, and disk types to use to optimize your cloud database performance.

MySQL DBaaS vs. Self-Managed MySQL

The first thing to consider when weighing between self-management and a MySQL Database-as-a-Service …

In this three-part blog series, we introduced a High Availability (HA) Framework for MySQL hosting in Part I, and discussed the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication in Part II. Now in Part III, we review how the framework handles some of the important MySQL failure scenarios and recovers to ensure high availability.

MySQL Failure Scenarios Scenario 1 – Master MySQL Goes Down

• The Corosync and Pacemaker framework detects that the master MySQL is no longer available. Pacemaker demotes the master resource and tries …

In a MySQL hosting replication setup, the parameter Seconds_Behind_Master (SBM), as displayed by the SHOW SLAVE STATUS command, is commonly used as an indication of the current replication lag of the slave. In this blog post, we examine how to understand and interpret this value in various situations.

Possible Values of  Seconds Behind Master

The value of SBM, as explained in the  MySQL documentation, depends on the state of the MySQL slave in general, and the states of MySQL slave SQL_THREAD and IO_THREAD in particular. While IO_THREAD connects with the master and reads the updates, SQL_THREAD applies these updates on the slave. Let’s examine the possible values of SBM during different states of the MySQL Slave.

When SBM Value is Null

• SBM is …

In Part I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting and discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions.

What is MySQL Semisynchronous Replication?

Simply put, in a …

Have you been experiencing slow MySQL startup times in GTID mode? We recently ran into this issue on one of our MySQL hosting deployments and set out to solve the problem. In this blog, we break down the issue that could be slowing down your MySQL restart times, how to debug for your deployment, and what you can do to decrease your start time and improve your understanding of GTID-based replication.

How We Found The Problem

We were investigating slow MySQL startup times on a low-end, disk-based MySQL 5.7.21 deployment which had GTID mode enabled. The system was part of a master-slave pair and was under a moderate write load. When restarting during a scheduled maintenance, we …

In this three-part blog series, we will explain the details and functionality of a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting using MySQL semisynchronous replication and the Corosync plus Pacemaker stack. In Part I, we’ll walk you through the basics of High Availability, the components of an HA framework, and then introduce you to the HA framework for MySQL.

What is High Availability?

The availability of a computer system is the percentage of time its services are up during a period of time. It’s generally expressed as a series of 9′s. For example, the table below shows availability and the corresponding downtime measured over one year.