Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports Delayed Replication
We all constantly find ways to improve the reliability of our application, starting from transactional commit performance to data durability and more. Delayed replication is a critical part of this enhancement too and here’s what AWS has come up with to make your efforts more successful than ever before.
Introduction to Amazon RDS
MariaDB is known as a highly popular open-source relational database. It is created by the original developers of MySQL. While the Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB server deployments in the cloud for your convenience. With the help of the service, you can easily deploy scalable MariaDB cloud databases in minutes. You can deploy them with cost-efficient and resizable hardware capacity.
The service frees you up to focus on your application by managing time-consuming database administration tasks. These tasks include backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling, and replication.
It’s quite impressive how it takes only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to launch and connect to a production-ready MariaDB database, that too within minutes. Amazon RDS for MariaDB database instances is pre-configured. They are pre-configured with parameters and settings for the server type you have selected. Amazon RDS is easier to set up, manage, and maintain than Oracle Database on Amazon EC2, allowing you to focus on more critical duties instead of Oracle Database maintenance.
Announcement Details
Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports Delayed Replication. What does it mean and why is it important? Let’s find out.
Importance of the Announcement
Given a recent announcement, Amazon Relational Database Service for MariaDB now comes with the support of delayed replication. This feature will allow you to set a configurable time period. By this time period, a read replica lags behind the source database. Until now, it was observed that there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica in a standard MariaDB replication configuration. But given the latest delayed replication, you can introduce an intentional delay as a strategy for disaster recovery.
It’d be a great practice, to begin with, if you understand how a delay can be helpful. It can help you recover from a manual error. For instance, if someone even accidentally drops a table from your primary database, you won’t have to feel worried about it anymore. You can simply stop the replication just before the point at which the table was dropped. Then you can promote the replica to become a standalone instance.
To make this process even stronger, Amazon RDS for MariaDB will now include a stored procedure.
Lastly, This procedure will stop replication once a specified point in the binary log is reached. The whole process of configuring a read replica for delayed replication is done via a stored procedure. It can either be performed when the read replica is initially created or be specified for an existing read replica. You can choose the method as per your requirement.
