Replicate production Maria DB server to Maria DB Azure PaaS

Question

Hello all,

we have been working on a customer use case where Maria DB is installed on the Azure VM and contains several large databases that are live in production. Customer wants to get this migrated to Maria DB PaaS service of Azure with minimal downtime and hence the most feasible way to get this done appears to be the replication. (though it has its own requirements and limitations that would still ask to restart the source database server instance resulting into minor downtime).

As per the documentation here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/mariadb/concepts-data-in-replication , it says that the binary logging has to be enabled on the source server because the replication is primarily driven by that. Upon checking the source system in our scenario, the binary logging does not seem to be enabled. So does this mean that we wont be able to use the replication now?

If the binary logging on the source database is enabled now and if replication is configured, would the replication still occur ensuring all the source content in all databases will be replicated to Maria DB PaaS server instance? Note that what I mean by all content is - the content that was created before enabling binary logging as well as content that is created after enabling it.

Idea is to establish the sync and let the source system running for few days (as it is live) and then perform the cut-over at some point by updating other apps that would now point to the azure instance.

Please share your views in case if you have done similar or have any suggestion to get this working using some different approach?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The binary logging functionality is how replication is facilitated between the master and the replica and is required as new items are written to the on-premise MariaDB instance. For the older events, you would need to run a specific sync or clone as a database seeding effort and then with binary logging enabled on both master and replica, can leverage data-in replication going forward.

1) Set-up and configure the Azure Database for MariaDB service.
2) Set-up replication between on-premise and Azure.
3) Clone the on-premise database to Azure and initiate Data-in Replication.