In this blog, we will review all the backup and restore strategies for MySQL, the cornerstones of any application. There are a few options, depending on your topology, MySQL versions, etc. And based on that, there are some questions we need to ask ourselves to make sure we make the right choices.

How many backups we need to keep safe, or what’s the best retention policy for us?

This means the number of backups to safeguard, whether local or remote (external fileserver, cloud). The retention policy can be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the free space available.

What is the Recovery Time Objective?

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to the amount of time that may pass during a disruption before it exceeds the maximum allowable threshold specified in the Business Continuity Plan.

The key question related to RTO is, “How quickly must the data on this system be restored?”

What is …

MySQL 5.7, alongside other many improvements, brought bulk load for creating an index (WL#7277 to be specific), which made ADD INDEX operations much faster by disabling redo logging and making the changes directly to tablespace files. This change requires extra care for backup tools. To block DDL statements on an instance, Percona Server for MySQL implemented LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP. Percona XtraBackup (PXB) uses this lock for the duration of the backup. This lock does not affect DML statements.

MySQL 5.7 doesn’t have an option to block an instance against DDL and to allow all MDL’s. Thus, Percona XtraBackup has also implemented –lock-ddl-per-table. Before we go into other details, let’s understand how –lock-ddl-per-table works up to now:

1. PXB …

Earlier this week, Oracle released their Q4 releases series. As on the previous releases, backward compatibility has been broken with previous versions of the server. This time on both MySQL 5.7 and 8.0:

MySQL 5.7.32

While our QA team was performing an extensive test on it,  we found out this version introduced a new compression format version. This change breaks backward compatibility with older versions of MySQL, which is expected on the 8.0 series but is not on 5.7. As Percona XtraBackup (PXB) is based on MySQL code, it makes MySQL 5.7.32 incompatible with current versions of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.20 and prior.

The issue does not affect only Percona XtraBackup but also prevents users from downgrading the server from 5.7.32 to any lower version on the 5.7 series – More details at …

Oftentimes, we need to replicate between Amazon Aurora and an external MySQL server. The idea is to start by taking a point-in-time copy of the dataset. Next, we can configure MySQL replication to roll it forward and keep the data up-to-date.

This process is documented by Amazon, however, it relies on the mysqldump method to create the initial copy of the data. If the dataset is in the high GB/TB range, this single-threaded method could take a very long time. Similarly, there are ways to improve the import phase (which can easily take 2x the time of the export).

Let’s explore some tricks to significantly improve the speed of this process.

Preparation Steps

The first step is to enable binary logs in Aurora. Go to the Cluster-level parameter group and make sure binlog_format …

Have you ever had to provision a large number of instances from a single backup? The most common use case is having to move to new hardware, but there are other scenarios as well. This kind of procedure can involve multiple backup/restore operations which can easily become a pain to administer. Let’s look at a potential way to make it easier using Percona Xtrabackup. The Percona XtraBackup tool provides a method of performing fast and reliable backups of your MySQL data while the system is running.

Leveraging Named Pipes

As per the Linux manual page, a FIFO special file (a named pipe) is similar to a pipe except that it is accessed as part of the filesystem. It can be opened by multiple processes for reading or writing.

For this …

We are excited to let you know about two upcoming changes to Percona XtraBackup which will align Percona XtraBackup Versions with Percona Server for MySQL.  These changes are to bring Percona XtraBackup release naming line with Percona Server and MySQL and ensure Percona XtraBackup executes complete backups.

The first is a change to the naming structure of releases.  This change is something we believe will help when working with Percona products and is designed to position Percona XtraBackup to be in sync with the current release naming strategy of Percona Server for MySQL and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

The current naming structure of …

On Monday, July 13, 2020, Oracle released MySQL 8.0.21.  This release contained a few new changes that cause issues with Percona XtraBackup.

First, this release introduced the ability to temporarily disable InnoDB redo logging (see the work log and documentation).  If you love your data, this feature should ONLY be used to speed up an initial logical data import and should never be used under a production workload.

When used, this new feature creates some interesting complications for Percona XtraBackup that you need to be aware of.  The core requirement for XtraBackup to be able to make consistent hot backups is to have some form of redo or write ahead log to copy and read from.  Disabling the InnoDB redo log will prevent XtraBackup from making a …

Update: Percona XtraBackup 8.0.12 now supports backup and restore processing for versions of MySQL 8.x; previous versions of Percona XtraBackup will not work with MySQL 8.0.20 and higher. More information

On Monday, April 27, 2020, Oracle released the highly anticipated 8.0.20 version of the MySQL database server. This release contains changes to the InnoDB redo log format which breaks compatibility with all currently released versions of the Percona XtraBackup 8.x series.

At this time, there are no known workarounds that will allow any version of Percona XtraBackup 8.x to function properly with MySQL 8.0.20.

We have identified the specific cause of the issue and diligently working towards a new release that will safely solve this issue as soon as possible.

Thank you for your …

The backup and restore of a complete database is an extensive exercise. But what if you need to restore just one table which has been mistakenly modified by an incorrect query? Help is at hand with Percona XtraBackup.

For our purpose, we will take a test database having tables created by the sysbench tool. The 8.0 versions of Percona XtraBackup and Percona Server for MySQL have been used in this test.

Restore Single Table

Here we will take the backup of the sbtest2 table and restore it. The initial checksum of the table is given below:

8.0.19>CHECKSUM TABLE sbtest2;
+--------------+-----------+
| Table        | Checksum | …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 8.0.7 on August 7, 2019. You can download it from our download site and apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, it …