December 8, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona XtraBackup is a great backup tool with lots of nice features to make online and consistent backups, although the variety of options can be a bit overwhelming. s9s_backup tries to make it simpler for users, it creates an easy to use interface for XtraBackup features such as full backups, incremental backups, streaming/non-streaming, and parallel compression.

Backups are organized into backup sets, consisting of a full backup and zero or more incremental backups. s9s_backup manages the LSNs (Log Sequence Number) of the XtraBackups. The backup set can then be restored as one single unit using just one command.

In earlier posts, we covered various ways on restoring your backup files …

September 25, 2014 By Severalnines

Coming up with a backup strategy that does not affect database performance or lock your tables can be tricky. How do you backup your production database cluster without affecting your applications? Should you use mysqldump or Percona Xtrabackup? When should you use incremental backups? Where do you store the backups? In this blog post, we will cover some of the common backup methods for Galera Cluster for MySQL/MariaDB, and how you can get the most out of these. 

Backup Method

There are various ways to backup your Galera Cluster data:

• xtrabackup (full physical backup)
• xtrabackup (incremental physical backup)
• mysqldump (logical backup)
• binary logging 
• replication slave

Xtrabackup (full backup)

Xtrabackup is an open-source MySQL hot …

This week we are talking about size, which is a subject that should matter to any system administrator in charge of the backup system of any project, and in particular database backups.

I sometimes get questions about what should be the best compression tool to apply during a particular backup system: gzip? bzip2? any other?

The testing environment

In order to test several formats and tools, I created a .csv file (comma-separated values) that was 3,700,635,579 bytes in size by transforming a recent dump of all the OpenStreetMap nodes of the European portion of Spain. It had a total of 46,741,126 rows and looked like this:

171773  38.6048402      -0.0489871      4       2012-08-25 00:37:46     12850816        472193  rubensd
171774  38.6061981      -0.0496867      2       2008-01-19 10:23:21     666916  9250 …

The Percona Backup Service managed service launched today. It ensures properly configured backups run successfully as scheduled on customer provided backup storage – whether on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Backup issues or production data recovery are efficiently handled by Percona Managed Services technicians with deep knowledge of MySQL.

As we state in our white papers, “MySQL backup and recovery are a foundational piece of any infrastructure. A well-tested backup and recovery system can be the difference between a minor outage and the end of a business.” While MySQL backups are “foundational,” they …

I ran into an issue the other day where Xtrabackup was not completing and threw the following error:

xtrabackup: error: log block numbers mismatch:
xtrabackup: error: expected log block no. 134860907,
but got no. 176803931 from the log file.
xtrabackup: Error: xtrabackup_copy_logfile() failed.

When researching this error, I found that this error is generally caused when the following 2 conditions must are met, and this is generally when “xtrabackup cannot catch up with log writing activity on the server, so the log wraps around before xtrabackup can copy records before they are overwritten”:

1. The log block numbers must wrap around, which only happens once per 1 GB of log writes.
2. The wrap-around point must be between the last checkpoint and the current log tail at the time the backup starts.

Discussed here:
…

Mysqldump is a fantastic tool for backing up and restoring small and medium sized MySQL tables and databases quickly. However, when databases surge into the multi-terabyte range restoring from logical backups is inefficient. It can take a significant amount of time to insert a hundred million plus rows to a single table, even with very fast I/O. Programs like MySQL Enterprise Backup and Percona XtraBackup allow non-blocking binary copies of your InnoDB tables to be taken while it is online and processing requests. XtraBackup also has an export feature that allows InnoDB file per tablespaces to be detached from the shared table space and imported to a completely different MySQL instance.

The necessary steps to export and import InnoDB tables are in the XtraBackup documentation  …

ClusterControl for Percona XtraDB Cluster is now available in three different versions thanks to our partnership with Severalnines. ClusterControl will make it simpler to manage and monitor Percona XtraDB Cluster, MySQL Cluster, MySQL Replication, or MySQL Galera.

I am very excited about our GA release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 last week. As Vadim described in his blog post announcing the release, we have brought together the benefits of Percona Server 5.6, Percona XtraBackup and Galera 3 to create a drop-in compatible, open source, state-of-the-art high availability MySQL clustering solution. We could not have done it without the close cooperation and help of our partners at Codership. To learn more, join us on February …

I was busy testing a PXC cluster today when suddenly was buffled with a confusing error:

140108 23:33:39 innobackupex: Connecting to MySQL server with DSN 'dbi:mysql:;mysql_read_default_group=xtrabackup' (using password: NO).
innobackupex: Error: Failed to connect to MySQL server as DBD::mysql module is not installed at /usr/bin/innobackupex line 2913.

OK, so my first though was DBD::mysql is missing, but as I checked:

[root@pxc03 keepalived]# yum list installed| grep perl-DBD-MySQL
perl-DBD-MySQL.x86_64 4.013-3.el6 @base

After some digging, it’s not actually the module that is missing – it was one of the module’s dependency which is the mysql client library.

[root@pxc03 keepalived]# yum deplist perl-DBD-MySQL.x86_64|grep mysql
dependency: libmysqlclient.so.16()(64bit)
provider: mysql-libs.x86_64 5.1.71-1.el6
dependency: libmysqlclient.so.16(libmysqlclient_16)(64bit)
provider: mysql-libs.x86_64 …

this is a short script for daily backup of the OpenStack MySQL and the /etc direcotry of the control node

[root@dev-epg-rhos-01 BACKUP]# cat /root/bin/epg.innobackupex.openstack.sh
#!/bin/sh
# done for epgmad4@tid.es
# Barcelona Thu Oct 17 16:30:36 CEST 2013

days_to_keep=7
NFS=/BACKUP
exportDate=`date +%Y-%m-%d.%H.%M.%S`
export_DIR=${NFS}/${HOSTNAME}.${exportDate}
test ! -d "${export_DIR}" && echo "$(date) : creating ${export_DIR}" && mkdir -p "${export_DIR}"
export_MySQL_DIR=${export_DIR}/mysql.bckp
export_ETC_DIR=${export_DIR}/etc.bckp
rsync -avh /etc ${export_ETC_DIR}
echo "=========================================================================================================" >> ${export_DIR}/README.restore.with.innobackupex
echo "HOW to restore this FULL mysql backup" >> ${export_DIR}/README.restore.with.innobackupex
echo "=========================================================================================================" …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.4 on August 9th, 2013. 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.

New Features:

• Percona XtraBackup has introduced …