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Re: what pros/cons of storing binary log in an InnoDB table?

 

Hello Kristian,

Thank you for the detailed reply. Hearing the pros and cons of these
different design choices is helpful.

There is too much to reply to in a single email, so I will focus on
different pieces in different emails. I see the following interesting
pieces that I would like to expand on:
 - problems with having the binary log be an InnoDB (or any
transactional engine) table
 - the "proper solution"
 - the "current long-term plan"
 - improvements made to replication in MySQL 5.6 that does not require
fsync on commit and to Maria 10 that does not require binary logging
on slaves for GTID.

In this email, I will focus on (and hope to understand better) just
the problems with having the binary log be an InnoDB table.

Here are some design problems you mentioned:
" One problem you will find if you try implementing this is - how are you going
to keep the concept of binlog order? A relational table is unordered. You can
use an increasing uint64 as the primary key, but then how are you going to
ensure that the order in the table is the same as the commit order in InnoDB
(InnoDB redo log)? If you take a lock from allocating the sequence number to
doing the commit, then you have introduced a serialisation bottleneck and
killed group commit. If you accept different order (as Drizzle does), then
when you take an XtraBackup, it may not be consistent with the binlog."

I don't see issues with using an increasing uint64 as the primary key.
You ask how we ensure that the order in the table is the same as the
commit order in InnoDB. Why does this matter? As long as the user work
done to InnoDB tables and changes to the binary log are done with the
same transaction (the way MySQL 5.6 updates the relay-log info on
slaves with the same transaction) I don't understand why matters. If
XtraBackup works properly, then the backed up data should have
something that is consistent across the board.

I must say, I have a limited knowledge of InnoDB. Is there something I
am missing here?

As far as the performance issues go, you say we are writing the data 6
times. With the current solution, we write the data four times, three
for InnoDB and once to the binary log. So really, there seems to be a
33% increase of data written. This does not strike me as so bad. Also,
other engines will probably only need to write the data one more time,
not two more times. Yes, this is more data written, but it is
sequential data being written, so hopefully the hit is not too bad.

Thoughts?
-Zardosht


On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:28 AM, Kristian Nielsen
<knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Zardosht Kasheff <zardosht@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> Instead of having the binary log be stored as a log file, a table with
>> a transactional engine (like InnoDB) is used. I have NOT done any
>
> Yes, this is a tempting idea, is it not? Drizzle even implemented this.
> But there are some subtle problems, and I think there are better solutions.
>
> One problem you will find if you try implementing this is - how are you going
> to keep the concept of binlog order? A relational table is unordered. You can
> use an increasing uint64 as the primary key, but then how are you going to
> ensure that the order in the table is the same as the commit order in InnoDB
> (InnoDB redo log)? If you take a lock from allocating the sequence number to
> doing the commit, then you have introduced a serialisation bottleneck and
> killed group commit. If you accept different order (as Drizzle does), then
> when you take an XtraBackup, it may not be consistent with the binlog.
>
> You will be writing your data *6* times: To the real table, when flushing its
> buffer pool pages. To the double-write buffer while flushing, and to the redo
> log before flushing. Then to the binlog table, and before that to the redo log
> and the doublewrite buffer. I could never reconcile myself with this.
>
> So it is tempting, but re-implementing binlog is a huge change (also in terms
> of end-user visibility), and my personal opinion is that for such huge a
> change we need to go to the best solution, not second-best.
>
>> investigation into whether this is possible, but I'm wondering what
>> people abstractly think of this idea.
>
>> My major motivation is to find a way to have users not be forced to
>> fsync on every transaction commit on slaves. With crash safety of
>
> My preference is MWL#164:
>
>     http://askmonty.org/worklog/Server-RawIdeaBin/?tid=164
>
> This reduces to one fsync() per group commit. But as you point out, this is
> still horrendously expensive for a single-threaded slave :-(
>
> Abstractly, the proper solution is to store the binlog and the InnoDB redo log
> (and all other transactional-type logs) in the *same* log. The upper layer
> would provide a general transactional log facility, and binlog, InnoDB,
> partitioning, etc. would use this instead of their own logs. But it is hard to
> see how we could arrive there from current code ...
>
> For MariaDB global transaction ID, I support crash-safe without binlog
> enabled, so there turning off fsync() will be possible. But this does not help
> if a slave also needs to act as a master.
>
> Parallel replication can help a lot, by allowing group commit, amortising the
> cost of the fsync(). But it would still be nice to solve the orginal problem.
>
> As you say, for a slave it is not a problem to loose transactions in a crash
> as they can be just replicated again. The problem is to be consistent between
> what is in the InnoDB tables and what is in the binlog.
>
> InnoDB already records in a crash-safe way the binlog position of the last
> commit. So if we can ensure that InnoDB is never ahead of the binlog, we can
> just cut the binlog after a crash if it has more events than what InnoDB
> recovered. We could do this by doing binlog writes as async I/O O_DIRECT
> writes, and sending a signal somehow to InnoDB so it would buffer its own redo
> log until binlog is safe on disk. Then no fsync() would be needed. But this is
> so far just a loose idea, it needs more thought to be sure it can work...
>
> Anyway, this is my current long-term plan: if we cannot have a proper single
> database-wide transaction log, then instead coordinate writes between the
> multiple logs that exist. Delay writes to logs so that they are never ahead of
> the master log. And at crash, either recover missing pieces of logs from the
> master log (MWL#164), or cut logs to be consistent. Then we can be consistent
> without any fsync() delays.
>
>>  - As I understand it, for two phase commit, storage engines are
>> currently expected to fsync once after a transaction is prepared and
>> once after a transaction is committed. If the binary log is an InnoDB
>> table, then two-phase commit is unnecessary and the number of fsyncs
>> on the system is cut in half.
>
> In MariaDB 10 and MySQL 5.6, the fsync() at commit is no longer needed (InnoDB
> does not have it).
>
> [Note that IIRC, MySQL 5.6 breaks the storage engine API, you will need to
> implement the skip-fsync-at-commit-stage, or you will loose group commit.]
>
>>  - With crash safe slaves on MySQL 5.6, one theoretically does not
>> need to enable fsyncs on transaction commit on slaves. If some data
>> gets lost after a crash, then the data may be replayed from the
>> master. However, to get GTIDs working, one must enable the binary log
>> on slaves, which requires two-phase commit, which require fsyncs. By
>
> Yes, requiring binlog on slaves is a serious mistake :-(
>
> Ok, as you can perhaps tell, this is something I have thought a lot about over
> the past years, so I have a lot of ideas but it is a bit difficult to put it
> all in a single mail reply without it becomming mostly a jumble of loose
> ideas. You are welcome to ask for more details on any specific points of
> interest.
>
>  - Kristian.


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