Introduction

In MySQL Enterprise Backup v3.7.0 (MEB 3.7.0) a new option '–incremental-base' was introduced. Using this option a user can take in incremental backup without specifying the '–start-lsn' option. Description of this option can be found here. Instead of '–start-lsn' the user can provide the location …

XtraBackup is a great piece of software from Percona, which allows creating (nearly) lock-less MySQL/InnoDB backups. The tool has been around for quite some time and recently even received a major version bump. I have relied on it many times over the years. As it turns out, using it in some configurations may lead to heavy swapping or prevent MySQL from running queries.

So far I only kept complaining about the wrapper script XtraBackup has been distributed with and which was taken from Oracle’s InnoDB Hot Backup. The infamous innobackupex-1.5.1 was neither well written, nor was it even fully compatible with the XtraBackup’s feature set. This sometimes led to weird problems where there should not be any.

This time the problem can appear elsewhere. Mostly when one using the tool does not understand how it works in certain circumstances.

How does XtraBackup work?

In a few short words. XtraBackup …

WordPress on S3: no more backups

How much trouble will it be if your webserver failed?  No trouble at all, if your website keeps its content on reliable Amazon S3 storage.

There are a lot of nuances in ensuring proper backups and restores of websites. When was the last backup taken? How much data might have been lost? How long will it take to recover it? When was the last time you tested restore? Do you even have an offsite backup?

Now that you can run dynamic websites off Amazon S3 storage, we’ll demonstrate why you no longer need to worry about backing up and restoring your website data. Losing the webserver is no longer a disaster. Cloud storage offers almost unsurpassable reliability a lot of website owners (small & large) would benefit from. In a way you get an "instantaneous backup" to the cloud. Your …

How To Back Up MySQL Databases With mylvmbackup On Debian Squeeze

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Squeeze server.

Last month, Ronald Bradford, Giuseppe Maxia and Mark Leith spoke about how to simulate a mysqldump –ignore-database.
This mysqldump option doesn’t exist and these three guys have given us various helpful solutions.

But for those of us who use ZRM community to make backup with mysqldump, the –exclude-pattern seems to do the job :

--exclude-pattern "pattern" 
All databases or tables that match the pattern are not backed up. 
If --all-databases or --databases are specified, the exclude pattern applies
to …

Database backups are typically critical to organizations, and are an important part of an overall disaster recovery strategy.

MySQL Enterprise Backup performs online "Hot", non-blocking backups of your MySQL databases, and interfaces with media management software such as Symantec NetBackup, Oracle Secure Backup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to execute backup and restore operations.

Two new white papers are available to help you better understand:

• How to Connect MySQL Enterprise Backup with Media Management systems through System Backup to Tape (SBT) interface.
• How to specifically use MySQL Enterprise Backup with Symantec NetBackup.

Enjoy the white papers.

A few days ago I showed a quick way to extract one table form a mysqldump output. Here is a more complete version which supports extracting either a full schema or a table from the specified schema. If full schema is being extracted, the script also looks for any associated views and routines.

Usage is simple:
garfield ~ # ./extract.sh -f dump.sql -d redmine > redmine.sql
garfield ~ # ./extract.sh -f dump.sql -d redmine -t workflows > redmine-workflows.sql

You can grab the script from Downloads page.

extract.sh

#!/bin/bash

#
# Extracts a schema or a table from a text dump generated by mysqldump or phpMyAdmin
# (c) 2012 Maciej Dobrzanski http://www.dbasquare.com/
# Released under GNU General Public License, version 2
#

function help()
{
  cat <<EOF
  Usage: [-h] -f <dump file> -d <database …

Ronald Bradford and Giuseppe Maxia (hey guys!) wrote about different ways to ignore a database when using mysqldump –all-databases over the past couple of days.

Whilst the solutions are interesting, I wondered why not attack it from the proper approach, and add the option to mysqldump itself? Honestly, the patch is trivial, and doing anything against INFORMATION_SCHEMA with lots of databases and tables … well let’s just say … group_concat_max_len is the least of your worries..

15 minutes later I had a working solution:

To my surprise, I also found Bug#3228, created a little over 8 years ago.. I’ve posted the patch …

Using mysqldump is a quick way to do backups, although usually limited to only smaller databases – perhaps up to a few gigabytes large. It is still a fairly popular solution as majority of databases aren’t even that big. Also phpMyAdmin provides a variant of mysqldump format through its Export function. Everything works well for plain dump and restore, but in certain situations it is necessary to restore only a single table. With all data being in a single text file, it may not be a trivial task. Here is how I deal with the problem.

Rather than editing out parts of the file that I don’t need, I wrote simple one-liners that do that for me. These are not perfect as for example they can’t deal with multiple tables by the same name existing in several different schemas, but that so far never turned out to be a problem. I encourage you to suggest improved ways of doing this, just let me know in the …

A few days ago, Ronald Bradford asked for a mysqldump –ignore-database option.

As a workaround, he proposes:

mysqldump --databases `mysql --skip-column-names \
   -e "SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(schema_name SEPARATOR ' ') \
   FROM information_schema.schemata WHERE schema_name \
   NOT IN ('mysql','performance_schema','information_schema');" \
   >` >/mysql/backup/rds2.sql

It's a clever solution, but unfortunately it only works if you have a handful of schemas. If your databases happens to have several dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of schemas (which is where you need this option more), then the output will be truncated to the length of group_concat_max_len (by default, 1024.)

There are two alternative methods.

The all-shell methodThis method lets …