mysqld is the traditional MySQL server process. To be used with MySQL Cluster, mysqld needs to be built with support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine, as it is in the precompiled -max binaries available from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ for MySQL versions 4.1.3 and newer. If you build MySQL from source, you must invoke configure with the --with-ndbcluster option to enable NDB Cluster storage engine support.

For information about other MySQL server options and variables relevant to MySQL Cluster in addition to those discussed in this section, see Section 15.3.4, “MySQL Server Options and Variables for MySQL Cluster”.

If the mysqld binary has been built with Cluster support, the NDBCLUSTER storage engine is still disabled by default. You can use either of two possible options to enable this engine:

An easy way to verify that your server is running with the NDBCLUSTER storage engine enabled is to issue the SHOW ENGINES statement in the MySQL Monitor (mysql). You should see the value YES as the Support value in the row for NDBCLUSTER. If you see NO in this row or if there is no such row displayed in the output, you are not running an NDB-enabled version of MySQL. If you see DISABLED in this row, you need to enable it in either one of the two ways just described.

To read cluster configuration data, the MySQL server requires at a minimum three pieces of information:

Beginning with MySQL 4.1.5, node IDs can be dynamically allocated, in which case there is no need to specify them explicitly.

The mysqld parameter ndb-connectstring is used to specify the connectstring either on the command line when starting mysqld or in my.cnf. The connectstring contains the host name or IP address where the management server can be found, as well as the TCP/IP port it uses.

In the following example, ndb_mgmd.mysql.com is the host where the management server resides, and the management server listens for cluster messages on port 1186:

shell> mysqld --ndbcluster --ndb-connectstring=ndb_mgmd.mysql.com:1186

See Section 15.3.2.2, “The MySQL Cluster Connectstring”, for more information on connectstrings.

Given this information, the MySQL server will be a full participant in the cluster. (We often refer to a mysqld process running in this manner as an SQL node.) It will be fully aware of all cluster data nodes as well as their status, and will establish connections to all data nodes. In this case, it is able to use any data node as a transaction coordinator and to read and update node data.

You can see in the mysql client whether a MySQL server is connected to the cluster using SHOW PROCESSLIST. If the MySQL server is connected to the cluster, and you have the PROCESS privilege, then the first row of the output is as shown here:

mysql> SHOW PROCESSLIST \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
     Id: 1
   User: system user
   Host:
     db:
Command: Daemon
   Time: 1
  State: Waiting for event from ndbcluster
   Info: NULL