TiCDC FAQs

This document introduces the common questions that you might encounter when using TiCDC.

How do I choose start-ts when creating a task in TiCDC?

The start-ts of a replication task corresponds to a Timestamp Oracle (TSO) in the upstream TiDB cluster. TiCDC requests data from this TSO in a replication task. Therefore, the start-ts of the replication task must meet the following requirements:

• The value of start-ts is larger than the tikv_gc_safe_point value of the current TiDB cluster. Otherwise, an error occurs when you create a task.
• Before starting a task, ensure that the downstream has all data before start-ts. For scenarios such as replicating data to message queues, if the data consistency between upstream and downstream is not required, you can relax this requirement according to your application need.

If you do not specify start-ts, or specify start-ts as 0, when a replication task is started, TiCDC gets a current TSO and starts the task from this TSO.

Why can't some tables be replicated when I create a task in TiCDC?

When you execute cdc cli changefeed create to create a replication task, TiCDC checks whether the upstream tables meet the replication restrictions. If some tables do not meet the restrictions, some tables are not eligible to replicate is returned with a list of ineligible tables. You can choose Y or y to continue creating the task, and all updates on these tables are automatically ignored during the replication. If you choose an input other than Y or y, the replication task is not created.

How do I view the state of TiCDC replication tasks?

To view the status of TiCDC replication tasks, use cdc cli. For example:

cdc cli changefeed list --pd=http://10.0.10.25:2379

The expected output is as follows:

[{
    "id": "4e24dde6-53c1-40b6-badf-63620e4940dc",
    "summary": {
      "state": "normal",
      "tso": 417886179132964865,
      "checkpoint": "2020-07-07 16:07:44.881",
      "error": null
    }
}]

• checkpoint: TiCDC has replicated all data before this timestamp to downstream.
• state: The state of this replication task:
  • normal: The task runs normally.
  • stopped: The task is stopped manually or encounters an error.
  • removed: The task is removed.

What is gc-ttl in TiCDC?

Since v4.0.0-rc.1, PD supports external services in setting the service-level GC safepoint. Any service can register and update its GC safepoint. PD ensures that the key-value data later than this GC safepoint is not cleaned by GC.

When the replication task is unavailable or interrupted, this feature ensures that the data to be consumed by TiCDC is retained in TiKV without being cleaned by GC.

When starting the TiCDC server, you can specify the Time To Live (TTL) duration of GC safepoint by configuring gc-ttl. You can also use TiUP to modify gc-ttl. The default value is 24 hours. In TiCDC, this value means:

• The maximum time the GC safepoint is retained at the PD after the TiCDC service is stopped.
• The maximum time a replication task can be suspended after the task is interrupted or manually stopped. If the time for a suspended replication task is longer than the value set by gc-ttl, the replication task enters the failed status, cannot be resumed, and cannot continue to affect the progress of the GC safepoint.

The second behavior above is introduced in TiCDC v4.0.13 and later versions. The purpose is to prevent a replication task in TiCDC from suspending for too long, causing the GC safepoint of the upstream TiKV cluster not to continue for a long time and retaining too many outdated data versions, thus affecting the performance of the upstream cluster.

What is the complete behavior of TiCDC garbage collection (GC) safepoint?

If a replication task starts after the TiCDC service starts, the TiCDC owner updates the PD service GC safepoint with the smallest value of checkpoint-ts among all replication tasks. The service GC safepoint ensures that TiCDC does not delete data generated at that time and after that time. If the replication task is interrupted, or manually stopped, the checkpoint-ts of this task does not change. Meanwhile, PD's corresponding service GC safepoint is not updated either.

If the replication task is suspended longer than the time specified by gc-ttl, the replication task enters the failed status and cannot be resumed. The PD corresponding service GC safepoint will continue.

The Time-To-Live (TTL) that TiCDC sets for a service GC safepoint is 24 hours, which means that the GC mechanism does not delete any data if the TiCDC service can be recovered within 24 hours after it is interrupted.

How to understand the relationship between the TiCDC time zone and the time zones of the upstream/downstream databases?

What is the default behavior of TiCDC if I create a replication task without specifying the configuration file in --config?

If you use the cdc cli changefeed create command without specifying the -config parameter, TiCDC creates the replication task in the following default behaviors:

• Replicates all tables except system tables
• Enables the Old Value feature
• Skips replicating tables that do not contain valid indexes

Does TiCDC support outputting data changes in the Canal format?

Yes. To enable Canal output, specify the protocol as canal in the --sink-uri parameter. For example:

cdc cli changefeed create --pd=http://10.0.10.25:2379 --sink-uri="kafka://127.0.0.1:9092/cdc-test?kafka-version=2.4.0&protocol=canal" --config changefeed.toml

For more information, refer to Create a replication task.

Why does the latency from TiCDC to Kafka become higher and higher?

• Check how do I view the state of TiCDC replication tasks.

• Adjust the following parameters of Kafka:

  • Increase the message.max.bytes value in server.properties to 1073741824 (1 GB).
  • Increase the replica.fetch.max.bytes value in server.properties to 1073741824 (1 GB).
  • Increase the fetch.message.max.bytes value in consumer.properties to make it larger than the message.max.bytes value.

When TiCDC replicates data to Kafka, does it write all the changes in a transaction into one message? If not, on what basis does it divide the changes?

No. According to the different distribution strategies configured, TiCDC divides the changes on different bases, including default, row id, table, and ts.

For more information, refer to Replication task configuration file.

When TiCDC replicates data to Kafka, can I control the maximum size of a single message in TiDB?

Yes. You can set the max-message-bytes parameter to control the maximum size of data sent to the Kafka broker each time (optional, 10MB by default). You can also set max-batch-size to specify the maximum number of change records in each Kafka message. Currently, the setting only takes effect when Kafka's protocol is open-protocol (optional, 16 by default).

When TiCDC replicates data to Kafka, does a message contain multiple types of data changes?

Yes. A single message might contain multiple updates or deletes, and update and delete might co-exist.

When TiCDC replicates data to Kafka, how do I view the timestamp, table name, and schema name in the output of TiCDC Open Protocol?

The information is included in the key of Kafka messages. For example:

{
    "ts":<TS>,
    "scm":<Schema Name>,
    "tbl":<Table Name>,
    "t":1
}

For more information, refer to TiCDC Open Protocol event format.

When TiCDC replicates data to Kafka, how do I know the timestamp of the data changes in a message?

You can get the unix timestamp by moving ts in the key of the Kafka message by 18 bits to the right.

How does TiCDC Open Protocol represent null?

In TiCDC Open Protocol, the type code 6 represents null.

For more information, refer to TiCDC Open Protocol column type code.

How can I tell if a Row Changed Event of TiCDC Open Protocol is an INSERT event or an UPDATE event?

If the Old Value feature is not enabled, you cannot tell whether a Row Changed Event of TiCDC Open Protocol is an INSERT event or an UPDATE event. If the feature is enabled, you can determine the event type by the fields it contains:

• UPDATE event contains both "p" and "u" fields
• INSERT event only contains the "u" field
• DELETE event only contains the "d" field

For more information, refer to Open protocol Row Changed Event format.

How much PD storage does TiCDC use?

TiCDC uses etcd in PD to store and regularly update the metadata. Because the time interval between the MVCC of etcd and PD's default compaction is one hour, the amount of PD storage that TiCDC uses is proportional to the amount of metadata versions generated within this hour. However, in v4.0.5, v4.0.6, and v4.0.7, TiCDC has a problem of frequent writing, so if there are 1000 tables created or scheduled in an hour, it then takes up all the etcd storage and returns the etcdserver: mvcc: database space exceeded error. You need to clean up the etcd storage after getting this error. See etcd maintaince space-quota for details. It is recommended to upgrade your cluster to v4.0.9 or later versions.

Does TiCDC support replicating large transactions? Is there any risk?

TiCDC provides partial support for large transactions (more than 5 GB in size). Depending on different scenarios, the following risks might exist:

• The latency of primary-secondary replication might greatly increase.
• When TiCDC's internal processing capacity is insufficient, the replication task error ErrBufferReachLimit might occur.
• When TiCDC's internal processing capacity is insufficient or the throughput capacity of TiCDC's downstream is insufficient, out of memory (OOM) might occur.

Since v6.2, TiCDC supports splitting a single-table transaction into multiple transactions. This can greatly reduce the latency and memory consumption of replicating large transactions. Therefore, if your application does not have a high requirement on transaction atomicity, it is recommended to enable the splitting of large transactions to avoid possible replication latency and OOM. To enable the splitting, set the value of the sink uri parameter transaction-atomicity to none.

If you still encounter an error above, it is recommended to use BR to restore the incremental data of large transactions. The detailed operations are as follows:

1. Record the checkpoint-ts of the changefeed that is terminated due to large transactions, use this TSO as the --lastbackupts of the BR incremental backup, and execute incremental data backup.
2. After backing up the incremental data, you can find a log record similar to ["Full backup Failed summary : total backup ranges: 0, total success: 0, total failed: 0"] [BackupTS=421758868510212097] in the BR log output. Record the BackupTS in this log.
3. Restore the incremental data.
4. Create a new changefeed and start the replication task from BackupTS.
5. Delete the old changefeed.

The default value of the time type field is inconsistent when replicating a DDL statement to the downstream MySQL 5.7. What can I do?

Suppose that the create table test (id int primary key, ts timestamp) statement is executed in the upstream TiDB. When TiCDC replicates this statement to the downstream MySQL 5.7, MySQL uses the default configuration. The table schema after the replication is as follows. The default value of the timestamp field becomes CURRENT_TIMESTAMP:

mysql root@127.0.0.1:test> show create table test;
+-------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table | Create Table                                                                     |
+-------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| test  | CREATE TABLE `test` (                                                            |
|       |   `id` int(11) NOT NULL,                                                         |
|       |   `ts` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, |
|       |   PRIMARY KEY (`id`)                                                             |
|       | ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1                                           |
+-------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set

From the result, you can see that the table schema before and after the replication is inconsistent. This is because the default value of explicit_defaults_for_timestamp in TiDB is different from that in MySQL. See MySQL Compatibility for details.

Since v5.0.1 or v4.0.13, for each replication to MySQL, TiCDC automatically sets explicit_defaults_for_timestamp = ON to ensure that the time type is consistent between the upstream and downstream. For versions earlier than v5.0.1 or v4.0.13, pay attention to the compatibility issue caused by the inconsistent explicit_defaults_for_timestamp value when using TiCDC to replicate the time type data.

enable-old-value is set to true when I create a TiCDC replication task, but INSERT/UPDATE statements from the upstream become REPLACE INTO after being replicated to the downstream

When a changefeed is created in TiCDC, the safe-mode setting defaults to true, which generates the REPLACE INTO statement to execute for the upstream INSERT/UPDATE statements.

Currently, users cannot modify the safe-mode setting, so this issue currently has no solution.

When the sink of the replication downstream is TiDB or MySQL, what permissions do users of the downstream database need?

When the sink is TiDB or MySQL, the users of the downstream database need the following permissions:

• Select
• Index
• Insert
• Update
• Delete
• Create
• Drop
• Alter
• Create View

If you need to replicate recover table to the downstream TiDB, you should have the Super permission.

Why does TiCDC use disks? When does TiCDC write to disks? Does TiCDC use memory buffer to improve replication performance?

When upstream write traffic is at peak hours, the downstream may fail to consume all data in a timely manner, resulting in data pile-up. TiCDC uses disks to process the data that is piled up. TiCDC needs to write data to disks during normal operation. However, this is not usually the bottleneck for replication throughput and replication latency, given that writing to disks only results in latency within a hundred milliseconds. TiCDC also uses memory to accelerate reading data from disks to improve replication performance.

Why does replication using TiCDC stall or even stop after data restore using TiDB Lightning and BR from upstream?

Currently, TiCDC is not yet fully compatible with TiDB Lightning and BR. Therefore, please avoid using TiDB Lightning and BR on tables that are replicated by TiCDC.