Foreword for the First Edition
A lot of research has been done on replication, but most of the resulting concepts are never put into production. In contrast, MySQL replication is widely deployed but has never been adequately explained. This book changes that. Things are explained here that were previously limited to people willing to read a lot of source code and spend a lot of time—including a few late-night sessions—debugging it in production.
Replication enables you to provide highly available data services while enduring the inevitable failures. There are an amazing number of ways for things to fail, including the loss of a disk, server, or data center. Even when hardware is perfect or fully redundant, people are not. Database tables will be dropped by mistake. Applications will write incorrect data. Occasional failure is assured. But with reasonable preparation, recovery from failure can also be assured. The keys to survival are redundancy and backups. Replication in MySQL supports both.
But MySQL replication is not limited to supporting failure recovery. It is frequently used to support read scale-out. MySQL can efficiently replicate to a large number of servers. For applications that are read-mostly, this is a cost-effective strategy for supporting a large number of queries on commodity hardware.
And there are other interesting uses for MySQL replication. Online data definition language (DDL) is a very complex feature to implement in a relational database management ...
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