gh-ost/doc/migrating-with-sbr.md

Migrating with Statement Based Replication

Even though gh-ost relies on Row Based Replication (RBR), it does not mean you can't keep your Statement Based Replication (SBR).

gh-ost is happy to, and actually prefers and suggests to, connect to a replica. On this replica, it is happy to:

• issue the heavyweight INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries that make a table structure analysis
• issue a select count(*) from mydb.mytable, should --exact-rowcount be provided
• connect itself as a fake replica to get the binary log stream

All of the above can be executed on the master, but we're more comfortable that they execute on a replica.

Please note the third item: gh-ost connects as a fake replica and pulls the binary logs. This is how gh-ost finds the table's changelog: it looks up entries in the binary log.

The magic is that your master can still produce SBR, but if you have a replica with log-slave-updates, you can also configure it to have binlog_format='ROW'. Such a replica accepts SBR statements from its master, and produces RBR statements onto its binary logs.

gh-ost is happy to modify the binlog_format on the replica for you:

• If you supply --switch-to-rbr, gh-ost will convert the binlog format for you, and restart replication to make sure this takes effect.
• If your replica is an intermediate master, i.e. further serves as a master to other replicas, gh-ost will not convert the binlog_format.
• At any case, gh-ost will not convert back to STATEMENT (SBR). This is because you may be running multiple migrations concurrently. Being able to run concurrent migrations is one of the design goals of this tool. It's your own responsibility to switch back to SBR once all pending migrations are complete.

Summary

• If you're already using RBR, all is well for you
• If not, convert one of your replicas to binlog_format='ROW', or let gh-ost do this for you.