The folks over at zmanda who specialize in MySQL backup are doing a webinar on December 13th, this Thursday.  They specifically mention it as relevant for Oracle DBAs or anyone moving to MySQL.  Looks to be an interesting event.

Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.

In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix …

A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and "safe" dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I've had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book.

Progress on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition is coming along nicely. You have probably noticed the lack of epic multi-part articles on this blog lately -- that's because I'm spending most of my spare time on the book. At this point, we have significant work done on some of the hardest chapters, like Schema Optimization and Query Optimization. I've been deep in the guts of those hard optimization chapters for a while now, so I decided to venture into lighter territory: Backup and Recovery, which is one of the few chapters we planned to "revise and expand" from the first edition, rather than completely writing from scratch. I'd love to hear your thoughts and wishes -- click through to the full article for more details on the chapter and how it's shaping up.

Eric Bergen from Proven Scaling (which I had the pleasure to meet in person during the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara last month) was kind enough to send me a patch for the mylmbackup tool, which justifies a new release:

Attached is a patch file for mylvmbackup that adds the ability to use
lvm version 2 and perform innodb recovery on the snapshot prior to
creating a tar ball. The option is named --innodb-recover.

I've also fixed a bug with default value handling for command line
options. In version 0.4 if a config file was specified default values
in the script were all changed to blank. This means that the config
file had to supply values for every variable instead of just the
values that need to be changed from default.

This …

I am happy to announce version 0.4 of mylvmbackup, a tool to perform consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

For this release I'd like to especially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project, who contributed another batch of useful changes and informed me that mylvmbackup is now in productive use to perform backups of the MySQL databases that power the project's Bugzilla bug tracking system. I am always glad to read about such use cases - how do you utilize mylvmbackup in your environment?

• The option handling has been improved. mylvmbackup now starts by using the builtin defaults, followed by the default configuration file (/etc/mylvmbackup.conf, followed by an alternative configuration file (specified via CLI …

Recently I stumbled over a posting on the German MySQL Forum from a user that accidentally removed all table files from a MySQL Server's data directory with a misbehaving shell script. He was surprised to find out that the server happily continued to serve requests and his web site was still fully operational, even though /var/lib/mysql/<database> was completely emtpy! The reason for this in a nutshell: the rm command only removed the reference to the table files from the database directory, the files itself were not removed from the file system yet as the mysqld process still had the files opened. So as long as a process keeps a file open, the kernel will not release the disk space occupied by the file and it will remain intact, albeit no longer visible.

Of course, the user was now desperate to recover the deleted tables files and was …

Recently I stumbled over a posting on the German MySQL Forum from a user that accidentally removed all table files from a MySQL Server's data directory with a misbehaving shell script. He was surprised to find out that the server happily continued to serve requests and his web site was still fully operational, even though /var/lib/mysql/<database> was completely emtpy! The reason for this in a nutshell: the rm command only removed the reference to the table files from the database directory, the files itself were not removed from the file system yet as the mysqld process still had the files opened. So as long as a process keeps a file open, the kernel will not release the disk space occupied by the file and it will remain intact, albeit no longer visible.

Of course, the user was now desperate to recover the deleted tables files and was …

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …