Galera Cluster para MariaDB y MySQL
World’s Most Advanced Features and Un-Seen Benefits
- True Multi-master, Active-Active Cluster Read and write to any node at any time.
- Synchronous Replication No slave lag, no data is lost at node crash.
- Tightly Coupled All nodes hold the same state. No diverged data between nodes allowed.
- Multi-threaded Slave For better performance. For any workload.
- No Master-Slave Failover Operations or Use of VIP.
- Hot Standby No downtime during failover (since there is no failover).
- Automatic Node Provisioning No need to manually back up the database and copy it to the new node.
- Supports InnoDB.
- Transparent to Applications Required no (or minimal changes) to the application.
- No Read and Write Splitting Needed.
- Easy to Use and Deploy
Cloud Implementations with Galera Cluster
An additional benefit of Galera Cluster is good cloud support. Automatic node provisioning makes elastic scale-out and scale-in operations painless. Galera Cluster has been proven to perform extremely well in the cloud, such as when using multiple small node instances, across multiple data centers—AWS zones, for example—or even over Wider Area Networks.
- Optimized Network Protocol.Packets exchanged over WAN only at transaction commit time
- Topology-aware Replication. Transaction is sent to each datacenter only once
- Traffic Encryption
- Detection and automatic Eviction of Enreliable Nodes
Read More about Database Replication
Galera Replication
- Galera replication happens at transaction commit time, by broadcasting transaction write set to the cluster for applying
- Client connects directly to the DBMS and experiences close to native DBMS behavior
- wsrep API (write set replication API), defines the interface between Galera replication and the DBMS
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Replication
The basic difference between synchronous and asynchronous replication is that “synchronous” guarantees that if changes happened on one node of the cluster, they happened on other nodes “synchronously”. “Asynchronous” gives no guarantees about the delay between applying changes on “master” node and the propagation of changes to “slave” nodes. The delay can be short or long – it is a matter of luck. This also implies that if master node crashes, some of the latest changes may be lost.
Theoretically synchronous replication has a number of advantages over asynchronous:
- It’s always highly available (there is no data loss when one of the nodes crashes, and data replicas are always consistent)
- Transactions can be executed on all nodes in parallel.
- It can guarantee causality across the whole cluster (SELECT S issued after transaction T will always see the effects of transaction even if it is executed on another node)
However in practice synchronous database replication was traditionally implemented via the so-called “2-phase commit” or distributed locking which proved to be very slow. Low performance and complexity of implementation of synchronous replication led to a situation where asynchronous replication remains the dominant means for database performance scalability and availability. Widely adopted open-source databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL offer only asynchronous replication solution.
Read More about Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Replication
Certification Based Replication Method
The main idea in certification-based replication is that a transaction executes conventionally until it reaches the commit point, assuming there is no conflict. This is called optimistic execution.
When the client issues a COMMIT command, but before the actual commit occurs, all changes made to the database by the transaction and primary keys of the changed rows are collected into a write-set. The database then sends this write-set to all the other nodes.
The write-set then undergoes a deterministic certification test, using the primary keys. This is done on each node in the cluster, including the node that originates the write-set. It determines whether or not the node can apply the write-set.
If the certification test fails, the node drops the write-set and the cluster rolls back the original transaction. If the test succeeds, the transaction commits and the write-set is applied to the rest of the cluster.
Read More about Certification Based Replication
An alternative approach to synchronous database replication using Group Communication and transaction ordering techniques was suggested by a number of researchers (e.g. Database State Machine Approach and Don’t Be Lazy, Be Consistent) and prototype implementations have shown a lot of promise. We combined our experience in synchronous database replication and the latest research in the field to create Galera Replication Toolkit.
Galera replication is a highly transparent and scalable synchronous replication solution for application clustering to achieve high availability and improved performance. Galera-based clusters are:
- Highly available
- Highly transparent
- Highly scalable (near linear scalability may be reached depending on the application)
Generic Replication Library
Galera replication functionality is implemented as shared library and can be linked with any transaction processing system, which implements the wsrep API hooks. Galera replication library is a protocol stack providing functionality for preparing, replicating and applying of transaction write sets. It consists of:
- wsrep API specifies the interface – responsibilities for DBMS and replication provider
- wsrep hooks is the wsrep integration in the DBMS engine.
- Galera provider implements the wsrep API for Galera library
- certification layer takes care of preparing write sets and performing certification
- replication manages replication protocol and provides total ordering capabilities
- GCS framework provides plugin architecture for group communication systems
- many gcs implementations can be adapted, we have experimented with spread and our in-house implementations: vsbes and gemini