Using “ndb --initial” causes data loss on MySQL Cluster?

Question

I have a MySQL cluster with 1 management node, 2 data nodes and 2 mysql nodes.

I shutdown the cluster and then started it with the '--initial' flag on both the management node and the data nodes just to notice a little later that '--initial' does a completely different thing on the data nodes than it does on the management.

After I did that my tables disappeared and I see lines like this in the log:

2012-04-30 04:40:33 [MgmtSrvr] INFO     -- Node 2: Local checkpoint 91 started. Keep GCI = 149842 oldest restorable GCI = 107834
2012-04-30 04:40:36 [MgmtSrvr] INFO     -- Node 2: Local checkpoint 91 completed

This is a test database and I have only a few dozen rows on 2 tables, still this has been going on for about 4 days straight.

I'm running on Red Hat enterprise 5 and mysql-5.1.51 ndb-7.1.9. Mentioning this since MySQL documentation mentions it can take a substantial amount of time on some operation systems for the recovery files to be rebuilt.

Question is, will it recover my data if I wait long enough or should I just start over? And if so, do I need to do anything special or just recreating the same tables and data is enough?

Answer 1

unless you have performed a back-up, you should start over. The --initial command will delete all data from the data nodes