What is MySQL replication?
MySQL replication is a process that helps you maintain hight availability and allows you to easily keep multiple copies of a MySQL database server data by copying them automatically from a master to a slave database. This is helpful in multiple aspects, like, facilating a backup for the data,a way to analyze it without using the main database, or or to scale out your load on database hosts. Explaing the points a little as under.
Scaling out may be a tough term for new commer, so here I explain it a little, Suppose your website or applicaiton which uses this MySQL database has a high traffic volume now you can use point all select queries to one slave and backup can run on another slave and reporting on another slave while all insert takes place on the Master. This is called scaling out and this is how you can balance the load accross the database with Replication
In further tutorial we will cover a simple example of mysql replication
MySQL brought a number of significant enhancements to Replication in later versions, including Global Transaction IDs, event checksums, multi-threaded slaves and crash-safe slaves/masters. Replication got even better with MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8.0.

Replication Types


As of now there are two replication schemes supported by MySQL Replication:
1. (Standard) Asynchronous Replication:
MySQL Replication by default is asynchronous. This is the oldest, most popular and widely used replication type. With asynchronous replication, the master writes events to its binary log and slaves request them when they are ready. There is no guarantee that any event will ever reach any slave. It’s a loosely coupled master-slave relationship, where: Master does not wait for Slave. Slave determines how much to read and from which point in the binary log. Slave can be arbitrarily behind master in reading or applying changes. If the master crashes, transactions that it has committed might not have been transmitted to any slave. Consequently, failover from master to slave in this case may result in failover to a server that is missing transactions relative to the master.
Asynchronous replication provides lower write latency, since a write is acknowledged locally by a master before being written to slaves. It is great for read scaling as adding more replicas does not impact replication latency. Good use cases for asynchronous replication include deployment of read replicas for read scaling, live backup copy for disaster recovery and analytics/reporting.

2. Semi-Synchronous Replication:
MySQL database server also supports semi-synchronous replication, where the master does not confirm transactions to the client until at least one slave has copied the change to its relay log, and flushed it to disk. To enable semi-synchronous replication, extra steps for plugin installation are required, and must be enabled on the designated MySQL master and slave.
Semi-synchronous seems to be good and practical solution for many cases where high availability and no data-loss is important. But you should consider that semi-synchronous has a performance impact due to the additional round trip and does not provide strong guarantees against data loss. When a commit returns successfully, it is known that the data exists in at least two places (on the master and at least one slave). If the master commits but a crash occurs while the master is waiting for acknowledgment from a slave, it is possible that the transaction may not have reached any slave. This is not that big of an issue as the commit will not be returned to the application in this case. It is the application’s task to retry the transaction in the future. What is important to keep in mind is that, when the master failed and a slave has been promoted, the old master cannot join the replication chain. Under some circumstances this may lead to conflicts with data on the slaves (when master crashed after the slave received the binary log event but before master got the acknowledgement from the slave). Thus the only safe way is to discard the data on the old master and provision it from scratch using the data from the newly promoted master.
3. Group Replication:
This is a newly introduced concept in the MySQL Community Edition 5.7, and was GA’ed in MySQL 5.7.17. It’s a rather new plugin build for virtual synchronous replication.
Whenever a transaction is executed on a node, the plugin tries to get consensus with the other nodes before returning it completed back to the client. Although the solution is a completely different concept compared to standard MySQL replication, it is based on the generation and handling of log events using the binlog.

Global Transaction Identifier (GTID)

The Global Transaction Identifiers (GTID) was introduced in MySQL 5.6. GTID is a unique identifier created and associated with each transaction committed on the server of origin (master). This identifier is unique not only to the server on which it originated, but is unique across all servers in a given replication setup. There is a one-to-one mapping between all transactions and all GTIDs. We will explain this in further tutorials.

Multi-Threaded Slave

MySQL 5.6 allows us to execute replication events in parallel as long as data is split across several databases. This feature is named “Multi-Threaded Slave” (MTS) and it is easy to enable by setting slave_parallel_workers to a > 1 value. In MySQL 5.7, it can now be used for any workload, including intra-schema, unlike 5.6 where it could only be applied with one thread per schema. MySQL 8.0 introduced write-sets, which allows for even better parallelization of applying binary log events.

Crash-Safe Slave

Crash safe means even if a slave mysqld/OS crash, you can recover the slave and continue replication without restoring MySQL databases onto the slave. To make crash safe slave work, you have to use InnoDB storage engine only, and in 5.6 you need to set relay_log_info_repository=TABLE and relay_log_recovery=1.
Durability (sync_binlog = 1 and innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1) is NOT required.

Group Commit

InnoDB, like any other ACID-compliant database engine, flushes the redo log of a transaction before it is committed. InnoDB uses group commit functionality to group multiple such flush requests together to avoid one flush for each commit. With group commit, InnoDB issues a single write to the log file to perform the commit action for multiple user transactions that commit at about the same time, significantly improving throughput.

Topology for MySQL Replication


1. Master with Slaves (Single Replication):
This the most straightforward MySQL replication topology. One master receives writes, one or more slaves replicate from the same master via asynchronous or semi-synchronous replication. If the designated master goes down, the most up-to-date slave must be promoted as new master. The remaining slaves resume the replication from the new master.
2. Master with Relay Slaves (Chain Replication):
This setup use an intermediate master to act as a relay to the other slaves in the replication chain. When there are many slaves connected to a master, the network interface of the master can get overloaded. This topology allows the read replicas to pull the replication stream from the relay server to offload the master server. On the slave relay server, binary logging and log_slave_updates must be enabled, whereby updates received by the slave server from the master server are logged to the slave's own binary log. Using slave relay has its problems: log_slave_updates has some performance penalty. Replication lag on the slave relay server will generate delay on all of its slaves. Rogue transactions on the slave relay server will infect of all its slaves. If a slave relay server fails and you are not using GTID, all of its slaves stop replicating and they need to be reinitialized.
3. Master with Active Master (Circular Replication):
Also known as ring topology, this setup requires two or more MySQL servers which act as master. All masters receive writes and generate binlogs with a few caveats: You need to set auto-increment offset on each server to avoid primary key collisions. There is no conflict resolution. MySQL Replication currently does not support any locking protocol between master and slave to guarantee the atomicity of a distributed update across two different servers. Common practice is to only write to one master and the other master acts as a hot-standby node. Still, if you have slaves below that tier, you have to switch to the new master manually if the designated master fails. You can deploy this topology with ClusterControl 1.4 and later. Previously, ClusterControl would raise an alarm because two or more masters were currently running. One master will be configured as read-only while the other is writable. However, locking and conflict resolution need to be handled by the application itself. ClusterControl does not support two writable masters in a replication setup, one of those two masters has to be in read_only mode.
4. Master with Backup Master (Multiple Replication):
The master pushes changes to a backup master and to one or more slaves. Semi-synchronous replication is used between master and backup master. Master sends update to backup master and waits with transaction commit. Backup master gets update, writes to its relay log and flushes to disk. Backup master then acknowledges receipt of the transaction to the master, and proceeds with transaction commit. Semi-sync replication has a performance impact, but the risk for data loss is minimized.
This topology works well when performing master failover in case the master goes down. The backup master acts as a warm-standby server as it has the highest probability of having up-to-date data when compared to other slaves.
5. Multiple Masters to Single Slave (Multi-Source Replication):
Multi-Source Replication enables a replication slave to receive transactions from multiple sources simultaneously. Multi-source replication can be used to backup multiple servers to a single server, to merge table shards, and consolidate data from multiple servers to a single server.
MySQL and MariaDB have different implementations of multi-source replication, where MariaDB must have GTID with gtid-domain-id configured to distinguish the originating transactions while MySQL uses a separate replication channel for each master the slave replicates from. In MySQL, masters in a multi-source replication topology can be configured to use either global transaction identifier (GTID) based replication, or binary log position-based replication. More on MariaDB multi source replication can be found in this blog post. For MySQL, please refer to the MySQL documentation.
6. Galera with Replication Slave (Hybrid Replication):
Hybrid replication is a combination of MySQL asynchronous replication and virtually synchronous replication provided by Galera. The deployment is now simplified with the implementation of GTID in MySQL replication, where setting up and performing master failover has become a straightforward process on the slave side.
Galera cluster performance is as fast as the slowest node. Having an asynchronous replication slave can minimize the impact on the cluster if you send long-running reporting/OLAP type queries to the slave, or if you perform heavy jobs that require locks like mysqldump. The slave can also serve as a live backup for onsite and offsite disaster recovery.
Hybrid replication is supported by ClusterControl and you can deploy it directly from the ClusterControl UI. For more information on how to do this, please read the blog posts - Hybrid replication with MySQL 5.6 and Hybrid replication with MariaDB 10.x.