MySQL Utilities and Global Transaction Identifiers

The new MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release (DMR) includes many new enhancements. One of the most impressive is the use of Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) for replication. With GTIDs enabled, administrators no longer need to keep track of binary log files and positions. In a nutshell, GTIDs simplify the setup and maintenance of replication.

MySQL Utilities has taken this a step further by providing two new utilities that automate two of the most complex replication administration tasks - switchover and failover. Switchover is changing the role of an active, healthy master to one of its slaves whereas failover is the act of promoting a candidate slave to become the new master. Clearly, switchover is an elective operation and failover is performed when there are issues with the master.

The GTID utilities are included in release-1.0.5 of MySQL Utilities. They are included as a plugin for MySQL Workbench or via source download from launchpad (see below). The new GTID utilities are included in Workbench version 5.2.39.

Automatic Failover Utility
The most impressive utility is mysqlfailover, It is an interactive tool used to report replication health, report GTIDs in use, and perform automatic failover. Yes, that’s right - you can setup mysqlfailover to automatically failover to one of a specific set of slaves whenever the master goes offline. It is designed to work with the MySQL 5.6.5 and later versions of the server.


http://drcharlesbell.blogspot.com/2012/04/mysql-utilities-and-global-transaction.html