Posted On: Feb 18, 2022

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports delayed replication, allowing you to set a configurable time period by which a read replica lags behind the source database. In a standard MariaDB replication configuration, there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica. With delayed replication, you can introduce an intentional delay as a strategy for disaster recovery.

A delay can be helpful when you want to recover from a manual error. For example, if someone accidentally drops a table from your primary database, you can stop the replication just before the point at which the table was dropped and promote the replica to become a standalone instance. To assist with this process, Amazon RDS for MariaDB now includes a stored procedure that will stop replication once a specified point in the binary log is reached.

Configuring a read replica for delayed replication is done via stored procedure and can either be performed when the read replica is initially created or be specified for an existing read replica. Delayed replication is available for MariaDB version 10.6.5 and higher.

For more details on delayed replication, please refer to Configuring Delayed Replication on MariaDB in the Amazon RDS User Guide.