Pythian Group

In October 2008, Baron posted How to Check MySQL Replication Integrity Continually. Here at Pythian we have developed a method based on that post, and added “verifying that masters and slaves are in sync” to our standard battery of tests.

We call it “Continual replication sync checking”. This article will explain how it works, how to test and make the procedure non-blocking, benchmarks from the real world, issues we encountered along the way, and finally Pythian’s procedure of setting up continual replication sync in a new environment.

At the 2010 MySQL User Conference & Expo, my co-worker Danil Zburivsky did a presentation about this, and you can get the slides in ODP (Open Office) format or watch the 46-minute video on YouTube.

How it works

On the master, mk-table-checksum is run. In order to make the checksum operation online, we use the modulo and offset features of mk-table-checksum to checksum only part of the data at a time. The checksum is run (from cron) on the master and replicates to the slave. The results are captured in a result table, and a separate process checks the result table and notifies us of any discrepancies.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

Last night at the Boston MySQL User Group I presented on how to get a consistent snapshot to build a slave, how to use mk-table-checksum to check for differences between masters and slaves on an ongoing basis, and how to use tools such as mk-table-sync and mysqldump to sync the data if there are any discrepancies.

The slides are online at http://technocation.org/files/doc/slave_sync.pdf.

The video can be watched on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un0wqYKmbWY or directly in your browser with the embedded player below:

Read the rest of this entry . . .