Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.9 on May 7th, 2014. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.1 series. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking …

We’ve recently received a number of questions on how to implement incremental MySQL backups alongside encryption with Percona XtraBackup. Some users thought it was not initially possible because with the default

--encrypt

options with XtraBackup, all files will be encrypted, but alas, that is not the case. This is where the option

--extra-lsn-dir

becomes useful, because it allows you to save LSN (Log Sequence Number) information to another directory and exclude it from encryption, allowing you to use the same information needed by incremental backups. Enough talk, let me show you.

Because you would want to usually script your backup and restore procedure, I’d use variables here as well to make you more familiar. First, I’d create 3 folders, where my backups will be stored, ‘full’ for full backups, ‘incr’ for …

I’d like to congratulate Canonical with the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Release, it really looks like a great release, and I say it having my own agenda It looks even more great because it comes with a full line of Percona Software.
If you install Ubuntu 14.04 and run aptitude search you will find:

• Percona Toolkit
• Percona XtraBackup
• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Percona Server (as part of Percona XtraDB Cluster installation)

Percona Toolkit and …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 introduces a new “log archiving” feature. Percona XtraBackup 2.1.5 supports “apply archived logs.” What does it mean and how it can be used?

Percona products propose three kinds of incremental backups. The first is full scan of data files and comparison the data with backup data to find some delta. This approach provides a history of changes and saves disk space by storing only data deltas. But the disadvantage is a full-data file scan that adds load to the disk subsystem. The second kind of incremental backup avoids extra disk load during data file scans.

The idea is in reading only changed data pages. The information about what specific pages were changed is provided by the server itself which …

TL;DR version: The backup locks feature introduced in Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and can be used to take both physical and logical backups with less downtime on busy servers. To employ the feature with mysqldump, use mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. The next release of Percona XtraBackup will also be using backup locks automatically if the target server supports the feature.

Now on to the gory details, but let’s start with some history.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

mysql> FLUSH TABLES;
# execute myisamchk, myisampack, backup / restore some tables, etc.

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be …

Before Percona XtraBackup 2.1.7 and Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.15-25.3, rsync was the only SST method supporting GTID in the way that it was possible to move an asynchronous slave from one Galera node to another one (related bug).

Indeed, previous versions of Percona XtraBackup didn’t copy any binary log and due to that, moving the async slave to another master, just broke replication (when writes still happened).

Now with the latest version of Percona XtraBackup and Percona XtraDB Cluster, wsrep_sst_xtrabackup-v2 handles the last binlog sent from Percona XtraBackup and allows the move to another …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.7 on January 24th, 2014. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.1 series. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking …

I recently conducted a test backup of my “master-slave” setup in my VirtualBox as I was migrating from Percona Server 5.6.12 to version 5.6.13-rel61.0 with Percona XtraBackup v2.2.0 rev. 4885. However, doing the backup on my slave, I encountered this problem:

[04] Compressing and streaming ./test/checksum.ibd
[01] Compressing and streaming ./mysql/slave_master_info.ibd
Assertion "to_read % cursor->page_size == 0" failed at fil_cur.cc:293
innobackupex: Error: The xtrabackup child process has died at /usr/bin/innobackupex line 2641.

This is related to a bug posted by my colleague George  …

I recently had a case where replication lag on a slave was caused by a backup script. First reaction was to incriminate the additional pressure on the disks, but it turned out to be more subtle: Percona XtraBackup was not able to execute FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK due to a long-running query, and the server ended up being read-only. Let’s see how we can deal with that kind of situation.

In short

Starting with Percona XtraBackup 2.1.4, you can:

• Configure a timeout after which the backup will be aborted (and the global lock released) with the lock-wait-threshold, lock-wait-query-type and lock-wait-timeout options
• Or automatically kill all queries that prevent the lock to be granted with the kill-long-queries-timeout and kill-long-query-type settings

Full documentation is …

I recently blogged on setting up Experimental Git mirror of Oracle MySQL trees up on GitHub. I’m now happy to announce that there are also mirrors for:

• Percona Server
• Percona XtraBackup
• Percona Playback

I’ve also updated the Oracle MySQL GIT mirror to include MySQL 5.7 and the (now abandoned) MySQL 6.0. I include the abandoned 6.0 tree as it can provide useful archaeology as to where some code came from.

I’d love to hear about any positive/negative experiences using these mirrors. Hopefully shortly I’ll fix up the last …