A shared JDBC master/slave group works by sharing a common database using the JDBC persistence adapter. Brokers automatically configure themselves to operate in master mode or slave mode, depending on whether or not they manage to grab a mutex lock on the underlying database table.

The advantage of this configuration are:

The disadvantages of this configuration are:

Figure 6 shows the initial state of a JDBC master/slave group. When all of the brokers are started, one of them grabs the mutex lock on the database table and becomes the master. All of the other brokers become slaves and pause while waiting for the lock to be freed up. Only the master starts its transport connectors, so all of the clients connect to it.

Figure 6. JDBC Master/Slave Initial State

Figure 7 shows the state of the group after the original master has shut down or failed. As soon as the master gives up the lock (or after a suitable timeout, if the master crashes), the lock on the database table frees up and another broker grabs the lock and gets promoted to master.

Figure 7. JDBC Master/Slave after Master Failure

After the clients lose their connection to the original master, they automatically try all of the other brokers listed in the failover URL. This enables them to find and connect to the new master.

In a JDBC master/slave configuration, there is nothing special to distinguish a master broker from the slave brokers. The membership of a particular master/slave group is defined by the fact that all of the brokers in the cluster use the same JDBC persistence layer and store their data in the same database tables.

Example 22 shows the configuration used be a master/slave group that stores the shared broker data in an Oracle database.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:amq="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                      http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd
  http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core
  http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core/activemq-core-5.3.1.xsd">

    <broker xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core"
            brokerName="brokerA">
        ...        
        <persistenceAdapter>
            <jdbcPersistenceAdapter dataSource="#oracle-ds"/>
        </persistenceAdapter>
        ...		  
    </broker>

    <bean id="oracle-ds" 
          class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource"
          destroy-method="close">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver"/>
        <property name="url" value="jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:AMQDB"/>
        <property name="username" value="scott"/>
        <property name="password" value="tiger"/>
        <property name="poolPreparedStatements" value="true"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

Clients of shared JDBC master/slave group must be configured with a failover URL that lists the URLs for all of the brokers in the group. Example 23 shows the client failover URL for a group that consists of three brokers: broker1, broker2, and broker3.

failover:(tcp://broker1:61616,tcp://broker2:61616,tcp://broker3:61616)

For more information about using the failover protocol see ????.

You can restart the failed node at any time and it will rejoin the group. It will rejoin the group as a slave because one of the other brokers already owns the mutex lock on the database table, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. JDBC Master/Slave after Master Restart