When you have multiple database servers working together as nodes in a cluster, it’s beneficial to understand how data consistency is established. In this post, we’re going to take a look at the various cluster consistency levels that you can choose from within InnoDB Group Replication and see how they impact data flow and failure recovery.

Let’s start with a quick refresher on what data consistency is. In a nutshell, consistency is just a way of thinking about how data is duplicated across multiple nodes in a cluster. If you write a row of data to one node, that data is not considered to be consistent within the cluster until it has been written to all of the other participating nodes. Without consistency, it’s possible to write data to one node in the cluster but not see it immediately when reading from another node in the cluster. In some cases, the aforementioned scenario, better known as eventual consistency, is acceptable but …