How to Implement MySQL Read/Write Splitting with Xiaomi’s Gaea Middleware

Gaea Overview

Gaea is a MySQL‑protocol database middleware developed by Xiaomi's e‑commerce R&D team, widely used in Xiaomi Mall for order, community, and activity services. It supports sharding, SQL routing, and read/write splitting, compatible with Mycat and Kingshard routing rules.

MySQL Master‑Slave Replication

Gaea requires a MySQL master‑slave replication environment. Refer to MySQL master‑slave replication tutorials for setup.

Installing Go Environment

Download Go from https://golang.org/dl/ and extract to /mydata.

tar -zxvf go1.13.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz -C /mydata/

Add /mydata/go/bin to the PATH variable.

# Edit profile
vim /etc/profile
# Append
export GOROOT=mydata/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
# Apply changes
source /etc/profile

Verify installation with go version.

go version go1.13.5 linux/amd64

Installing Gaea

Download the Gaea source zip from https://github.com/XiaoMi/Gaea and unzip to /mydata/gaea/. unzip Gaea-master.zip Enter /mydata/gaea/ and build with make build. make build After compilation, the executable gaea appears in /mydata/gaea/bin.

Configuration

Since etcd is not set up, change the local config file /mydata/gaea/etc/gaea.ini to use file mode: config_type=file Create a namespace JSON file (e.g., /mydata/gaea/etc/file/namespace/mall_namespace_1.json) to define master/slave connections and other settings.

{
  "name": "mall_namespace_1",
  "online": true,
  "read_only": false,
  "allowed_dbs": {"mall": true},
  "slices": [{
    "name": "slice-0",
    "user_name": "root",
    "password": "root",
    "master": "192.168.6.132:3307",
    "slaves": ["192.168.6.132:3308"],
    "capacity": 12,
    "max_capacity": 24,
    "idle_timeout": 60
  }],
  "users": [{
    "user_name": "macro",
    "password": "123456",
    "namespace": "mall_namespace_1",
    "rw_flag": 2,
    "rw_split": 1
  }],
  "default_slice": "slice-0"
}

Running Gaea in Docker

Build a Docker image using the following Dockerfile:

# Base image
FROM golang:latest
# Add source archive
ADD Gaea-master.tar.gz /go/Gaea-master
# Move source
RUN bash -c 'mv /go/Gaea-master/Gaea-master /go/gaea'
WORKDIR /go/gaea
# Compile
RUN bash -c 'make build'
EXPOSE 13306
ENTRYPOINT ["/go/gaea/bin/gaea"]
MAINTAINER macrozheng

Convert the source zip to a .tar.gz archive, then build: docker build -t gaea:1.0.2 . Copy the configuration directory to the host path /mydata/gaea-docker/etc/ and run the container:

cp -r /mydata/gaea/etc/ /mydata/gaea-docker/etc/

docker run -p 13306:13306 --name gaea \
  -v /mydata/gaea-docker/etc:/go/gaea/etc \
  -d gaea:1.0.2

Testing Read/Write Splitting

Disable slave replication, insert a row via Gaea, and verify that the row appears only in the master database, confirming write routing, while reads return no row, confirming read routing to the slave.

Integration with SpringBoot

In a SpringBoot application, configure the datasource to point to the Gaea proxy address; no additional read/write logic is required.

References

Official Gaea repository: https://github.com/XiaoMi/Gaea