5.1 Introduction to Replication

MySQL 3.23.15 and up features support for one-way replication. One server acts as the master, while one or more other servers act as slaves. The master server writes updates to its binary log files, and maintains an index of the files to keep track of log rotation. These logs serve as a record of updates to be sent to slave servers. When a slave server connects to the master server, it informs the master of its last position within the logs since the last successfully propagated update. The slave catches up any updates that have occurred since then, and then blocks and waits for the master to notify it of new updates.

A slave server can also serve as a master if you want to set up chained replication servers.

Note that when you are using replication, all updates to the tables that are replicated should be performed on the master server. Otherwise, you must always be careful to avoid conflicts between updates that users make to tables on the master and updates that they make to tables on the slave.

One-way replication has benefits for robustness, speed, and system administration:

• Robustness is increased with a master/slave setup. In the event of problems with the master, you can switch to the slave as a backup.

• Better response time for clients can be achieved by splitting the load for processing client queries between the master and slave servers. SELECT queries may be sent to the slave to reduce the query processing load of the master. Statements that modify data should still be sent to the master so that the master and slave do not get out of sync. This load-balancing strategy is effective if non-updating queries dominate, but that is the normal case.

• Another benefit of using replication is that you can perform backups using a slave server without disturbing the master. The master continues to process updates while the backup is being made. See Section 4.6.1, "Database Backups ."