17.1.5.4 Verifying Replication of Anonymous Transactions

This section explains how to monitor a replication topology and verify that all anonymous transactions have been replicated. This is helpful when changing the replication mode online as you can verify that it is safe to change to GTID transactions.

There are several possible ways to wait for transactions to replicate:

The simplest method, which works regardless of your topology but relies on timing is as follows: if you are sure that the slave never lags more than N seconds, just wait for a bit more than N seconds. Or wait for a day, or whatever time period you consider safe for your deployment.

A safer method in the sense that it does not depend on timing: if you only have a master with one or more slaves, do the following:

If you have a master and multiple levels of slaves, or in other words you have slaves of slaves, repeat step 2 on each level, starting from the master, then all the direct slaves, then all the slaves of slaves, and so on.

If you use a circular replication topology where multiple servers may have write clients, perform step 2 for each master-slave connection, until you have completed the full circle. Repeat the whole process so that you do the full circle twice.

For example, suppose you have three servers A, B, and C, replicating in a circle so that A -> B -> C -> A. The procedure is then: