MySQL Enterprise Backup (http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/backup.html) ("MEB") has always provided a simple, reliable online backup solution for InnoDB backed applications that includes DBA-expected functionality around:

• policies that require full, incremental, partial and logged based backup
• point in time recovery
• back up compression
• back up and recovery for MyISAM, Merge, Partition, Archive

In addition, MEB also provides a scriptable "set it and forget it" command line interface that allows DBAs to schedule and control backup operations at the server and database levels.  Integration with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/advisors.html) ensures that any MEB related issues are quickly identified and DBAs alerted so there is no lapse in the ability to recover when needed.

In the spirit of evolving MEB to meet even greater demands for speedy online backup operations, the MEB Engineering team has just released version 3.8 for production use.  MEB 3.8 provides a substantial improvement in backup operation performance by implementing parallel processing of related internal operations. In this release, during both backup and restore operations, certain operations are now performed in parallel: reading/writing data, compression/decompression, and page checksum validation during backup. The parallel execution takes advantage of multi-threading and the resulting performance increase is particularly evident when backing up to or restoring from RAID and SSD storage, and when using compressed backups.  Internal benchmarks show that performance gains range from 20% to 1000% depending on the size and content of the data involved, so users should fully expect to see incremental performance improvements in specific use cases. 

As with previous versions, MEB 3.8 is fully compatible with backups taken using previous versions.  While the upgrade path to MEB 3.8 is straightforward, I recommend reviewing all of the related performance improving options and general bug fixes in version 3.8.  You can find all you need to know to get up and running here.

Existing MySQL Enterprise Edition (http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/) customers can access 3.8 from the MyOracle Support Portal.  Evaluators can download MEB 3.8 from Oracle's Software Delivery Cloud within the next few days.

Congratulations to the MEB Engineering team on another great release.  More to come!

Thanks for your support of MySQL!