molt-replicator

molt replicator

Continuous change-data-capture (CDC) replication from source databases to CockroachDB. Run after molt fetch completes the initial bulk load.

Important: replicator is a separate binary from molt. It is not invoked by molt fetch. The data-load-and-replication mode in molt fetch is deprecated — use replicator directly instead.

Architecture

Source DB ──► [replicator] ──► Staging DB (_replicator schema) ──► Target CockroachDB
                  ▲
            Publication/
            Slot/BinLog/
            LogMiner

Replicator reads changes from the source, buffers them in a staging schema on the target CRDB cluster, and applies them to the target tables.

Subcommands by Source

Source	Command
PostgreSQL	replicator pglogical
MySQL	replicator mylogical
Oracle	replicator oraclelogminer
Kafka	replicator kafka
Cloud storage	replicator objstore
CockroachDB CDC	replicator start

Full Fetch → Replicator Workflow

Step 1: Initial bulk load with molt fetch

drop-on-target-and-recreate drops any existing target tables first; run this only against a fresh or empty target.

molt fetch \
  --source "postgresql://<user>:<password>@source:5432/db" \
  --target "postgresql://root@crdb:26257/db" \
  --bucket-path "s3://mybucket/migration" \
  --table-handling drop-on-target-and-recreate

Step 2: Create publication on source (PostgreSQL)

-- Run on source PostgreSQL:
CREATE PUBLICATION molt_fetch FOR ALL TABLES;
-- (molt fetch may have already created this; check first)

Step 3: Create staging database on target

-- Run on target CockroachDB:
CREATE DATABASE _replicator;

Step 4: Test connectivity

# preflight only takes --stagingConn and --targetConn (always required for the
# target; stagingConn required if the target is not CRDB)
replicator preflight \
  --stagingConn "postgresql://root@crdb:26257/_replicator" \
  --targetConn "postgresql://root@crdb:26257/db"