How to handle solr replication when master goes down - solr

I have solr setup, which is configured for Master and slave. The indexing is happening in master and slave is replicating the index at every 2 Min interval from master. So there is a delay of 2 Minutes in getting data from master to slave. Lets assume that my master was indexing at 10:42 some data but due to some hardware issue, master went down at 10:43. So now the data which was indexing at 10:42 was suppose to replicate on Slave by 10:44 (as we have set two minutes interval) Since now the master is not available, how to identify what the last indexed data in solr Master server. Is there way in solr log to track the index activity.
Thanks in Advance

Solr does log the indexing operations if you have the Solr log set to INFO. Any commit/add will show up in the log, so you can check the log for when the last addition was made. Depending on the setup, it might be hard to get the last log when then server is down, though.
You can reduce the time between replications to get more real time replication, or use SolrCloud instead (which should distribute the documents as they're being indexed).
There are also API endpoints (see which connections the Admin interface makes when browsing to the 'replication' status page) for getting the replication status, but those wouldn't help you if the server is gone.
In general - if the server isn't available, you'll have a hard time telling when it was last indexed to. You can work around a few of the issues by storing the indexing time outside of Solr from the indexing task, for example updating a value in memcache or MySQL every time you send something to be indexed from your application.

Related

SolrCloud - Updates to schema or dataConfig

We have a SolrCloud managed by Zookeeper. One concern that we have is with updating the schema or dataConfig on the fly. All changes that we are planning to make is in the indexing server node on the SolrCloud. Once the changes to the schema or dataConfig are made, then we do a full dataimport.
The concern is that the replication of the new indexes on the slave nodes in the cloud would not happen immediately, but only after the replication interval. Also for the different slave nodes the replication will happen at different times, which might cause inconsistent results.
For e.g.
The index replication interval is 5 mins.
Slave node A started at 10:00 => next index replication would be at 10:05.
Slave node B started at 10:03 => next index replication would be at 10:08.
If we make changes to the schema in the indexing server and re-index the results at 10:04, then the results of this change would be available on node A at 10:05, but in node B only at 10:08. Requests made to the SolrCloud between 10:05 and 10:08 would have inconsistent results depending on which slave node the request gets redirected to.
Please let me know if there is any way to make the results more consistent.
#Wish, what you are stating is not the behavior of a SolrCloud.
In SolrCloud indexing are routed to shard leaders and leader sent the copies to all the replicas.
At any point of time, if the ZooKeeper identifies that any of the replica is not in sync with leader, it will brought down to recovering mode. In this mode it will not serve any requests including the query.
P.S: In solr cloud configs are maintained at ZooKeeper and not at the nodes level.
I guess you are little confusing Solr Cloud and Master Slave mode, please confirm which one setup are you in?

Solr Cloud: Inconsistent Result

We are using Solr Cloud (4.3) for indexing data. We have 2 shard/2 replica servers in Solr Cloud.
We tried executing query on individual shard and it shows correct
When we execute same query (:) from Solr Admin Console, it display inconsistent results (number of records found is different each time).
What could be wrong? How can we troubleshoot it?
How Query is executed on different (shard/replica) and result combine? Is there any document which explain details about this?
I believe that you have to make sure that solr is doing soft commits to push information to the other replicas. This needs to be set to the frequency that you need the data to stay "current"
solr.autoSoftCommit.maxDocs=<max number of uncommitted documents before soft commit>
solr.autoSoftCommit.maxTime=<max time in ms before soft commit>
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrConfigXml
SOLR autoCommit vs autoSoftCommit
Do a commit operation on solr Cloud after you index your data. Then refresh your results,One or two times it might show you different results,But after that it should be pretty consistent.

What is the best solution for POS application?

I'm current on POS project. User require this application can work both online and offline which mean they need local database. I decide to use SQL Server replication between each shop and head office. Each shop need to install SQL Server Express and head office already has SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Replication will run every 30 minutes as schedule and I choose Merge Replication because data can change at both shop and head office.
When I'm doing POC, I found this solution not work properly, sometime job is error and I need to re-initialize its. This solution also take a very long time, which obviously unacceptable to user.
I want to know, are there any solutions better than one that I'm doing now?
Update 1:
Constraints of the system are
Almost of transactions can occur at
both shop and head office.
Some transaction need to work in real-time mode, that being said,
after user save data to their local shop that data should go to update at head office too. (If they're currently online)
User can working even their shop has disconnected from head office database.
Our estimation about amount of data is at-most 2,000 rows in each day.
Windows 2003 is OS of Server at head office and Windows XP is OS of all clients.
Update 2:
Currently they're about 15 clients, but this number will growing in fairly slow rate.
Data's size is about 100 to 200 rows per replication, I think it may not more than 5 MB.
Client connect to server by lease-line connection; 128 kbps.
I'm in situation that replication take a very long time (about 55 minutes while we've only 5 minutes or so) and almost of times I need to re-initialize job to start replicate again, if I don't re-initialize job, it can't replicate at all. In my POC, I find that it always take very long time to replicate after re-initialize, amount of time doesn't depend on amount of data. By the way, re-initialize is only solution I find it work for my problem.
As above, I conclude that, replication may not suitable for my problem and I think it may has another better solution that can serve what I need in Update 1:
Sounds like you may need to roll your own bi-directional replication engine.
Part of the reason things take so long is that over such a narrow link (128kbps), the two databases have to be consistent (so they need to check all rows) before replication can start. As you can imagine, this can (and does) take a long time. Even 5Mb would take around a minute to transfer over this link.
When writing your own engine, decide what needs to be replicated (using timestamps for when items changed), figure out conflict resolution (what happens if the same record changed in both places between replication periods) and more. This is not easy.
My suggestion is to use MS access locally and keep updating data to the server after a certain interval. Add a updated column to every table. When a record is added or updated, set the updated coloumn. For deletion you need to have a seprate table where you can put primary key value and table name. When synchronizing fetch all local records whose updated field not set and update (modify or insert) it to central server. Delete all records using local deleted table and you are done!
I assume that your central server is only for collecting data.
I currently do exactly what you describe using SQL Server Merge Replication configured for Web Synchronization. I have my agents run on a 1-minute schedule and have had success.
What kind of error messages are you seeing?

Cassandra Transaction with ZooKeeper - Does this work?

I am trying to implement a transaction system for Cassandra with the help of ZooKeeper. Since I don't think I have enough experience in database implementation, I would like to know if my idea would work in principle, or is there any major flaw.
Here is the high level description of the steps:
identify all the rows(keys) and columns to be edited. Let the keys be [K0..Kn]
apply write lock on all the rows involved (locks are in-memory Zookeeper implementation)
copy the old values to separate locations in Cassandra which are uniquely identified by key: [K'0..K'n]
store [K'0..K'n] and the mapping of them to [K0..Kn] in ZooKeeper using persistent mode
go ahead apply the update to the data
delete the entries in ZooKeeper
unlock the rows
delete the entries of [K'0..K'n] lazily on a maintenance thread (cassandra deletion uses timestamp, so K'0..K'n can be reused for another transaction with a newer time stamp)
Justification:
if the transaction failed on step 1-4, no change is applied, I can abort the transaction and delete whatever is stored in zookeeper and backup-ed in cassandra, if any.
if the transaction failed on step 5, the information saved on step 3 is used to rollback the any changes.
if the server happen to be failed/crashed/stolen by cleaning man, upon restart before serving any request, I check if there is any keys persisted in the zookeeper from step 4, if so, i will use those keys to fetch backed up data stored by step 3, and put those data to where they were, thus roll-back any failed transactions.
One of my concern is what would happen if some of the servers are partitioned from the cluster. I have no experience in this area, does my scheme work at all? and does it work if partition happens?
You should look into Cages: http://ria101.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/locking-and-transactions-over-cassandra-using-cages/
http://code.google.com/p/cages/

How do I ensure SQL Server replication is running?

I have two SQL Server 2005 instances that are geographically separated. Important databases are replicated from the primary location to the secondary using transactional replication.
I'm looking for a way that I can monitor this replication and be alerted immediately if it fails.
We've had occasions in the past where the network connection between the two instances has gone down for a period of time. Because replication couldn't occur and we didn't know, the transaction log blew out and filled the disk causing an outage on the primary database as well.
My google searching some time ago led to us monitoring the MSrepl_errors table and alerting when there were any entries but this simply doesn't work. The last time replication failed (last night hence the question), errors only hit that table when it was restarted.
Does anyone else monitor replication and how do you do it?
Just a little bit of extra information:
It seems that last night the problem was that the Log Reader Agent died and didn't start up again. I believe this agent is responsible for reading the transaction log and putting records in the distribution database so they can be replicated on the secondary site.
As this agent runs inside SQL Server, we can't simply make sure a process is running in Windows.
We have emails sent to us for Merge Replication failures. I have not used Transactional Replication but I imagine you can set up similar alerts.
The easiest way is to set it up through Replication Monitor.
Go to Replication Monitor and select a particular publication. Then select the Warnings and Agents tab and then configure the particular alert you want to use. In our case it is Replication: Agent Failure.
For this alert, we have the Response set up to Execute a Job that sends an email. The job can also do some work to include details of what failed, etc.
This works well enough for alerting us to the problem so that we can fix it right away.
You could run a regular check that data changes are taking place, though this could be complex depending on your application.
If you have some form of audit train table that is very regularly updated (i.e. our main product has a base audit table that lists all actions that result in data being updated or deleted) then you could query that table on both servers and make sure the result you get back is the same. Something like:
SELECT CHECKSUM_AGG(*)
FROM audit_base
WHERE action_timestamp BETWEEN <time1> AND BETWEEN <time2>
where and are round values to allow for different delays in contacting the databases. For instance, if you are checking at ten past the hour you might check items from the start the last hour to the start of this hour. You now have two small values that you can transmit somewhere and compare. If they are different then something has most likely gone wrong in the replication process - have what-ever pocess does the check/comparison send you a mail and an SMS so you know to check and fix any problem that needs attention.
By using SELECT CHECKSUM_AGG(*) the amount of data for each table is very very small so the bandwidth use of the checks will be insignificant. You just need to make sure your checks are not too expensive in the load that apply to the servers, and that you don't check data that might be part of open replication transactions so might be expected to be different at that moment (hence checking the audit trail a few minutes back in time instead of now in my example) otherwise you'll get too many false alarms.
Depending on your database structure the above might be impractical. For tables that are not insert-only (no updates or deletes) within the timeframe of your check (like an audit-trail as above), working out what can safely be compared while avoiding false alarms is likely to be both complex and expensive if not actually impossible to do reliably.
You could manufacture a rolling insert-only table if you do not already have one, by having a small table (containing just an indexed timestamp column) to which you add one row regularly - this data serves no purpose other than to exist so you can check updates to the table are getting replicated. You can delete data older than your checking window, so the table shouldn't grow large. Only testing one table does not prove that all the other tables are replicating (or any other tables for that matter), but finding an error in this one table would be a good "canery" check (if this table isn't updating in the replica, then the others probably aren't either).
This sort of check has the advantage of being independent of the replication process - you are not waiting for the replication process to record exceptions in logs, you are instead proactively testing some of the actual data.

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