Skip to main content
This feature is in and subject to change. To share feedback and/or issues, contact Support.
The ALTER VIRTUAL CLUSTER statement initiates a failover or failback in a and manages a virtual cluster. PCR happens between an active primary cluster and a passive standby cluster that accepts updates from the primary cluster. The unit of replication is a virtual cluster, which is part of the underlying infrastructure in the primary and standby clusters. The CockroachDB cluster has:
  • The system virtual cluster manages the cluster’s control plane and the replication of the cluster’s data. Admins connect to the system virtual cluster to configure and manage the underlying CockroachDB cluster, set up PCR, create and manage a virtual cluster, and observe metrics and logs for the CockroachDB cluster and each virtual cluster.
  • The application virtual cluster manages the cluster’s data plane. Application virtual clusters contain user data and run application workloads.
For more detail, refer to the .

​
Required privileges

To run the ALTER VIRTUAL CLUSTER statement from the standby cluster, users require the REPLICATIONDEST system and the MANAGEVIRTUALCLUSTER privilege. Use the statement to grant the necessary privileges, for example:

​
Synopsis

xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”? SQL syntax diagram

​
Parameters

​
Options

You can use the following options with ALTER VIRTUAL CLUSTER {vc} START REPLICATION OF virtual_cluster_spec ON physical_cluster to initiate the .

​
Examples

​
Start the failover process

To start the process from the standby cluster, use COMPLETE REPLICATION and provide the timestamp to restore as of:
You can use either:
  • SYSTEM TIME to specify a .
  • LATEST to specify the most recent replicated timestamp.
If you started the PCR stream with the READ VIRTUAL CLUSTER option, failing over with SYSTEM TIME will destroy the readonly virtual cluster. If you fail over with LATEST, the readonly virtual cluster will remain on the original standby cluster, but will not update with new writes.
When a virtual cluster is after initiating the failover process, you must start the service so that the virtual cluster is ready to accept SQL connections. On the standby cluster, run:
To stop the shared service for a virtual cluster and prevent it from accepting SQL connections:

​
Start the failback process

To to a cluster that was previously the primary cluster, use the ALTER VIRTUAL CLUSTER syntax:
The original primary virtual cluster may be almost up to date with the promoted standby’s virtual cluster. The difference in data between the two virtual clusters will include only the writes that have been applied to the promoted standby after failover from the primary cluster. () Use the READ VIRTUAL CLUSTER option with the ALTER VIRTUAL CLUSTER failback syntax to start a PCR stream that also creates a read-only virtual cluster on the standby cluster.
If you started the original PCR stream on an existing cluster without virtualization enabled, refer to the section for instructions.

​
See also