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I have an application that runs a single Membase server (1.7.1.1) that I use to cache data I'd otherwise fetch from our central SQL Server DB. I have one default bucket associated to the Membase server, and follow the traditional data-fetching pattern of:

  1. When specific data is requested, lookup the relevant key in Membase
  2. If data is returned, use it.
  3. If no data is returned, fetch data from the DB
  4. Store the newly returned data in Membase

I am looking to add an additional server to my default cluster, and rebalance the keys. (I also have replication enabled for one additional server).

In this scenario, I am curious as to how I can use the current pattern (or modify it) to make sure that I am not getting data out of sync when one of my two servers goes down in either an auto-failover or manual failover scenario.

From my understanding, if one server goes down (call it Server A), during the period that it is down but still attached to the cluster, there will be a cache key miss (if the active key is associated to Server A, not Server B). In that case, in the data-fetching pattern above, I would get no data returned and fetch straight from SQL Server. But, when I attempt to store the data back to my Membase cluster, will it store the data in Server B and remap that key to Server B on the next fetch?

I understand that once I mark Server A as "failed over", Server B's replica key will become the active one, but I am unclear about how to handle the intermittent situation when Server A is inaccessible but not yet marked as failed over.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Ka Wai Cheung
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1 Answers1

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That's a pretty old version. But several things to clarify.

  1. If you are performing caching you are probably using a memcached bucket, and in this case there is no replica.
  2. Nodes are always considered attached to the cluster until they are explicitly removed by administrative action (autofailover attempts to automate this administrative action for you by attempting to remove the node from the cluster if it's determined to be down for n amount of time).
  3. If the server is down (but not failed over), you will not get a "Cache Miss" per se, but some other kind of connectivity error from your client. Many older memcached clients do not make this distinction and simply return a NULL, False, or similar value for any kind of failure. I suggest you use a proper Couchbase client for your application which should help differentiate between the two.
  4. As far as Couchbase is concerned, data routing for any kind of operation remains the same. So if you were not able to reach the item on Server A. because it was not available, you will encounter this same issue upon attempting to store it back again. In other words, if you tried to get data from Server A and it was down, attempting to store data to Server A will fail in the exact same way, unless the server was failed over between the last fetch and the current storage attempt -- in which case the client will determine this and route the request to the appropriate server.

In "newer" versions of Couchbase (> 2.x) there is a special get-from-replica command available for use with couchbase (or membase)-style buckets which allow you to explicitly read information from a replica node. Note that you still cannot write to such a node, though.

Your overall strategy seems very sane for a cache; except that you need to understand that if a node is unavailable, then a certain percentage of your data will be unavailable (for both reads and writes) until the node is either brought back up again or failed over. There is no

Mark Nunberg
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