Continuing on the series of blog posts about MySQL High Availability, today we will talk about stale reads and how to overcome this issue.

The Problem

Stale reads is a read operation that fetches an incorrect value from a source that has not synchronized an update operation to the value (source Wiktionary).

A practical scenario is when your application applies INSERT or UPDATE data to your master/writer node, and has to read it immediately after. If this particular read is served from another server in the replication/cluster topology, the data is either not there yet (in case of an INSERT) or it still provides the old value (in case of an UPDATE).

If your application or part of your application …