MarkLogic Replicas - Active-Active or Active-Passive?

Question

In MarkLogic 7 are replicas active-active or active-passive?

Answer 1

Are you asking about local-disk failover (aka forest replication), database replication, or flexible replication?

In fact all three are designed for active-passive use: in other words, single master. But if you are new to MarkLogic you should put some thought into which features you plan to use, and how. Here is a quick summary: see the docs for more details.

• Forest replication (local-disk failover) is like RAID-1: useful for high availability. All replicas receive updates from the master, sharing the same MVCC timestamps. Only the active master is used for queries. Replication is synchronous.
• Database replication is good for disaster recovery. The replicas receive updates from the master, sharing the same MVCC timestamps. You can query the master or any replicas, but updates can only happen on the master. Replication lag is configurable.
• Flexible replication is good for application-specific use-cases. Document-level updates propagate using triggers, which is slower than the timestamp-based approaches. All updates should happen on the master, but queries can run on the master or any replica. Because it is trigger-based, flexrep allows replication of a subset of documents, and allows arbitrary XQuery to run as part of replication tasks. In theory this could even be used to implement multi-master (active-active) replication.

http://docs.marklogic.com/guide/cluster/failover

http://docs.marklogic.com/guide/database-replication

http://docs.marklogic.com/guide/flexrep