The reason I am posting to the dev list is that I might want to look into improving Derby in this area.
Just so that I am understand correctly, the steps for replication are: * Make a copy of the database to the slave * Start replication on the slave and on the master Now assume that this is working right along and all is well and then the system with the master fails. So replication is broke and then the slave can be restarted in non-replication mode. Time goes along and changes are made to the non-replicated database on the slave. Finally the master machine is brought back on line. So to get replication going we need to: * Copy the database from the slave to the master * Start replication on the slave and on the master This assumes that we have an affinity for having the master being the master but even if this is not the case and the old slave is going to become the new master, we need to copy the database from the slave to the master before starting replication again. Given a database that is fairly large (say on the order of 200Gb) and not a Gig connection between the master and slave, this could be a fairly long time for the transfer to occur. Unfortunately during this transfer time, neither database can be used. So while replication allows quick fail over in an initial failure, re-establishing the replication when the failure has been resolved can cause a substantial long downtime. So my question, is there any way that this downtime can be reduced? Could something be done with restoring a backup database and use the logs and then enable replication. Something like: * Make a file system level backup of the slave (using something like freeze and ZFS snapshot, this can take only a couple of seconds) and then allow the slave to continue o Assuming that the database logs are being used so that they can be replayed later * Transfer the database to the master * Transfer the logs o Replay each log on the master somehow to get the master to catch up to the slave as close as possible * Stop the slave so that it becomes consistent * Transfer the last log to the master and replay the master log * Enable replication on the master and the slave Basically limiting the downtime while the database transfer and log file transfer is taking place and then to have a small window of down time where they databases need to become in sync and then replication can be started again. Any thoughts on this? Is this an approach that is worth looking at?
