21 Oct 2020

Galera Cluster for MySQL 5.6.49, 5.7.31, and 8.0.21 released

Codership is pleased to announce a new Generally Available (GA) release of the multi-master Galera Cluster for MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and 8.0, consisting of MySQL-wsrep 5.6.49 (release notes, download), 5.7.31 (release notes, download), and 8.0.21 (release notes, download) with Galera Replication library 3.31 (release notes, download) implementing wsrep API version 25 for 5.6 and 5.7, and Galera Replication library 4.6 (release notes, download) implementing wsrep API version 26 for 8.0. This release incorporates all changes to MySQL 5.6.49, 5.7.31 , and 8.0.21 respectively, adding a synchronous option for your MySQL High Availability solutions.

It is recommend that one upgrades their Galera Cluster for MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and 8.0 because it releases a fix for security vulnerability CVE-2020-15180. The binary tarball is also compiled with OpenSSL 1.1.1g.

A highlight of this release is that with MySQL 8.0.21, you will now have access to using the Percona audit log plugin, which will help with monitoring and logging connection and query activity that has been performed on specific servers. This implementation is provided as an alternative to the MySQL Enterprise Audit Log Plugin.

In addition to fixing deadlocks that may occur between DDL and applying transactions, in 8.0.21 the write-set replication patch is now optimised to work with the Contention-Aware Transaction Scheduling (CATS) algorithm that is present in InnoDB. You can read more about transaction scheduling in the MySQL manual.

For those that requested the missing binary tarball package, the MySQL 8.0.21 build includes just that. Packages continue to be available for: CentOS 7 & 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 & 8, Debian 10, SLES 15 SP1, as well as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The latest versions are also available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

The Galera Replication library has had some notable fixes, one of which improves memory usage tremendously. The in-memory GCache index implementation now uses sorted std::deque instead of std::map, and this leads to an eightfold reduction in memory footprint. Hardware CRC32 is now supported on x86_64 and ARM64 platforms.

There are also three new status variables added: wsrep_flow_control_active (to tell you whether flow cotrol is currently active (replication paused) in the cluster), wsrep_flow_control_requested (to tell you whether the node has requested a replication pause because the received events queue is too long) and wsrep_gmcast_segment (to tell you which cluster segment the node belongs to).

For Galera Replication library 3.31, this is the last release for Debian Jessie and openSUSE 15.0. For Galera Replication library 4.6, this is the last release for openSUSE 15.0. For MySQL-wsrep 5.6 and 5.7, this is also the last release for Debian Jessie. For MySQL-wsrep 5.7 and MySQL-wsrep 8.0, this is the last release for openSUSE 15.0.