Hi,

My name is Ibrar Arshad and I am interested in working on the task of automatic slave provisioning(ticket: MDEV-7502) during GSOC 2017. I have read the summary on the ticket and have achieved a fair understanding of the problem and I am working towards ironing out the implementation details. The use-case as I understand is that we want the slave to auto-replicate the data from master once pointed the master and we want to do it in such a manner that the binlog events from current master position as well as the old data chunks are relayed to the slave in a parallel fashion. I have a few questions related to the proposal:

1. After reading a few pages on replication, my understanding is that after "CHANGE MASTER TO" and "START SLAVE", master starts sending binlog events from its current position to the slave which slave starts applying. The usual replication approach is to get the current binlog position on master, backup all the data till this position from master to slave, point slave to this position(or GTID) via "CHANGE MASTER TO", and START SLAVE to start replicating bin events from master. But for MDEV-7502, we want the normal events and old data chunks to be transmitted in parallel. The ticket summary mentions using separate domain_ids to send the new and old data in parallel, does there exist a way to do so currently? How can domain id be used here? Can we currently point the slave to 2 different bin positions on a single master and expect the master to send events from both positions? Or will this require some sort of new process/thread implementation on master to do so?
   
2. There are at-least two other approaches mentioned in the ticket's comments section. It doesn't seem like that a single approach has been finalized. This project doesn't seem to have a mentor yet to provide guidance so which approach should an applicant pursue further?

I would like to discuss the project approaches and implementation further in detail before submitting a proposal so can somebody please answer my queries and further suggest pointers to this project specific material which I can go through to get a deeper understanding? Thanks.