In a Group Replication topology, care needs to be taken when executing data definition statements, also commonly known as data definition language (DDL).

MySQL 8.0 introduces support for atomic Data Definition Language (DDL) statements, where the complete DDL statement is either committed or rolled back as a single atomic transaction. However, DDL statements, atomic or otherwise, implicitly end any transaction that is active in the current session, as if you had done a COMMIT before executing the statement. This means that DDL statements cannot be performed within another transaction, within transaction control statements such as START TRANSACTION ... COMMIT, or combined with other statements within the same transaction.

Group Replication is based on an optimistic replication paradigm, where statements are optimistically executed and rolled back later if necessary. Each server executes and commits without securing group agreement first. Therefore, more care needs to be taken when replicating DDL statements in multi-primary mode. If you make schema changes (using DDL) and changes to the data that an object contains (using DML) for the same object, the changes need to be handled through the same server while the schema operation has not yet completed and replicated everywhere. Failure to do so can result in data inconsistency when operations are interrupted or only partially completed. If the group is deployed in single-primary mode this issue does not occur, because all changes are performed through the same server, the primary.

For details on atomic DDL support in MySQL 8.0, and the resulting changes in behavior for the replication of certain statements, see Section 13.1.1, “Atomic Data Definition Statement Support”.