Andrew Mercer
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MySQL/MariaDB Overview

This section covers classic single-server and traditional-replication MySQL/MariaDB administration — much of it predates the Galera Cluster docs and is kept here for reference on systems still running the older model.

A Note on Replication Approach

The Replication page in this section documents traditional MySQL/MariaDB asynchronous binlog replication — master/slave and master/master. This is a genuinely different mechanism from Galera's synchronous multi-master replication, and it's worth being explicit about the trade-off: binlog replication is simpler to reason about and has been stable for decades, but slaves can lag arbitrarily far behind the master, and master/master setups risk silent data divergence if both sides write the same row before replication catches up (the auto_increment_offset trick shown in that doc reduces but doesn't eliminate this risk).

For new deployments needing multi-master HA, prefer Galera. This section stays useful for maintaining legacy instances that already run classic replication, and because the underlying SHOW SLAVE STATUS / binlog concepts still show up in mixed environments.

Scope of This Section

  • Administration — users, grants, everyday mysql CLI operations, table maintenance, security hardening
  • Backup and Restore — logical (mysqldump) and physical (LVM snapshot) backup strategies
  • Replication — master/slave, master/master, SSL-secured and SSH-tunneled replication, monitoring and recovery
  • Performance Tuning — my.cnf tuning, mysqltuner, slow query logging
  • Multiple Instances — running more than one mysqld on a single host
  • Troubleshooting — common errors and the OS/MySQL error code reference

MyISAM vs. InnoDB, in Brief

Several commands in this section (CHECK TABLE, REPAIR TABLE, myisam-recover) are specific to the older MyISAM storage engine, which doesn't support transactions or crash-safe recovery the way InnoDB does. Modern MariaDB/MySQL defaults to InnoDB, and repair-style tooling is far less often needed as a result — those commands are kept here for legacy tables/instances that still use MyISAM, not as a recommended starting point for new schemas.