Can a MySQL Enterprise Master replicate to a MySQL Community slave?

Question

Might be a silly question, but I haven't been able to find an answer after a few days of searching.

I have a single MySQL 5.0 Community server master (read/write) that replicates to four read-only slaves, also running 5.0 Community server.

I'd like to upgrade the master and one slave to MySQL Enterprise Platinum to be able to use the MySQL Enterprise monitoring and advisor tools, but leave the other three slaves running MySQL Community Server, so that we dont have to pay the $5k for each box. Is this possible? Will replication work across Enterprise & Community versions? Does anybody have experience with a setup like this, and are there pitfalls I should be aware of?

Thanks.

Answer 1

MySQL replication does not check versions or prevent replication based on Enterprise vs Community.

However, replication is impacted by versions and you should use the same version for all servers. If you can make sure the slaves are a higher (yet compatible) version than the master. For instance, if you're replicating a 5.1.x master, any 5.1.x slave will work. Any 5.4 slave will work. The reason it's okay to have higher version slaves is that, in a single master configuration, the bin-logs will be executed on that host only. In a multi-master replication it's best practice to have all hosts running identical versions.

Replication Considerations (stuff that should be identical across master/slave(s))

1. Architecture: 64bit vs 32bit
2. MySQL major version 5.0.x != 5.1.x
3. Packet Size (my.cnf configuration)
4. NIC speed

Here is MySQL's page regarding replication issues: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/replication-compatibility.html