Shortly after I wrote my last post regarding some advanced Connector/J load-balancing properties, Anirudh published a post describing configuration of RHEL LVS for load-balancing and failover of MySQL Cluster SQL nodes.  It’s an interesting post, and I admit I know very little about RHEL LVS, but it reminded me of problems I experienced when trying to set up load-balanced ColdFusion(!) servers at my last job, years back.  We ended up with a nice hardware load-balancer sitting in front of multiple ColdFusion web servers.  The problems we found were that our application depended upon session state, which was stored (of course) on a single web server.  The load-balancer allowed us to define sticky sessions, which is what we did, but it cost us.

We couldn’t really balance load – we could balance session counts, sort of.  Every time a new session started, the balancer would pick which server would handle that session – for the full duration of the session.  Some sessions might be short and little load, while others may be very long and represent a huge amount of load.

We also had a limited HA solution.  We implemented a heartbeat function so that when a web server went offline, the load-balancer would re-route affected users to an available server.  But because the session data was stored on the original server, the user had to log in again and recreate session data.  If the user was in the middle of a complex transaction, too bad.

The above problem also made maintenance a pain.  We could reconfigure the load-balancer on the fly to stop using a specific server for new sessions, but we couldn’t take that web server offline until all of the user sessions on that machine terminated.  That might take 5 minutes, or it might take 5 hours.

As I said, I’m no LVS expert, but I would expect similar problems when using it as a load-balancer for MySQL Cluster.  I suspect that only new connection requests are balanced, making persistent connections (like common Java connection pools) “sticky” to whatever machine the connection was originally assigned.  You probably cannot balance load at anything less than “connection” level, while Connector/J will rebalance after transactions or communications errors.  And anytime you lack the ability to redistribute load except at new connections, taking servers offline for maintenance will be problematic (Connector/J 5.1.13 provides a new mechanism to facilitate interruption-free maintenance, which I intend to blog about later).

This means that it probably works best when using other connectors which don’t support load-balancing, or with applications that don’t use persistent connections, but I wouldn’t use it instead of Connector/J’s load-balancing, and I definitely would not use it with Connector/J’s load-balancing – Connector/J won’t understand that multiple MySQL server instances live behind a single address, and won’t be able to coordinate load-balancing with LVS.

Connector/J provides a useful load-balancing implementation for Cluster or multi-master deployments.  As of Connector/J 5.1.12, this same implementation is used under the hood for balancing load between read-only slaves with ReplicationDriver.  When trying to balance workload between multiple servers, though, the driver has to decide when it’s safe to swap servers – doing so in the middle of a transaction would not make applications very happy.  Many of the same principles which apply to autoReconnect also apply here – you don’t want to lose important state information.

As a result, Connector/J will only try to pick a new server when one of the following happen:

1. At transaction boundaries (transactions are explicitly committed or rolled back)
2. A communication exception (SQL State starting with “08”) is encountered
3. When a SQLException matches conditions defined by user, using the extension points defined by the loadBalanceSQLStateFailover, loadBalanceSQLExceptionSubclassFailover or loadBalanceExceptionChecker properties.

The third condition is new, and revolves around three new properties introduced with Connector/J 5.1.13.  It allows you to control which SQLExceptions trigger failover. Let’s examine each of the new properties in detail.

loadBalanceExceptionChecker

The loadBalanceExceptionChecker property is really the key.  This takes a fully-qualified class name which implements the new com.mysql.jdbc.LoadBalanceExceptionChecker interface.  This interface is very simple, and you only need to implement the following method:

public boolean shouldExceptionTriggerFailover(SQLException ex)

In goes a SQLException, out comes a boolean.  True triggers a failover, false does not.  Easy!

You can use this to implement your own custom logic. An example where this might be useful is when dealing with transient errors with MySQL Cluster, where certain buffers may be overloaded. At the 2010 MySQL Conference, Mark Matthews and I presented a simple example during our tutorial which does this:

public class NdbLoadBalanceExceptionChecker
 extends StandardLoadBalanceExceptionChecker {

 public boolean shouldExceptionTriggerFailover(SQLException ex) {
  return super.shouldExceptionTriggerFailover(ex)
    ||  checkNdbException(ex);
 }

 private boolean checkNdbException(SQLException ex){
 // Have to parse the message since most NDB errors
 // are mapped to the same DEMC, sadly.
  return (ex.getMessage().startsWith("Lock wait timeout exceeded") ||
  (ex.getMessage().startsWith("Got temporary error")
  && ex.getMessage().endsWith("from NDB")));
 }
}

The code above extends com.mysql.jdbc.StandardLoadBalanceExceptionChecker, which is the default implementation. There’s a few convenient shortcuts built into this, for those who want to have some level of control using properties, without writing Java code. This default implementation uses the two remaining properties: loadBalanceSQLStateFailover and loadBalanceSQLExceptionSubclassFailover.

loadBalanceSQLStateFailover

The loadBalanceSQLStateFailover property allows you to define a comma-delimited list of SQLState code prefixes, against which a SQLException is compared. If the prefix matches, failover is triggered. So, for example, the following would trigger a failover if a given SQLException starts with “00”, or is “12345”:

loadBalanceSQLStateFailover=00,12345

loadBalanceSQLExceptionSubclassFailover

This property can be used in conjunction with loadBalanceSQLStateFailover or on it’s own. If you want certain subclasses of SQLException to trigger failover, simply provide a comma-delimited list of fully-qualified class or interface names to check against. For example, say you want all SQLTransientConnectionExceptions to trigger failover:

loadBalanceSQLExceptionSubclassFailover=java.sql.SQLTransientConnectionException

That’s all there is to it!