I frequently talk to our customer base about what keeps them up at night. While there is a large variance of answers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is the conditioned fear of some monster lurking behind the scenes that could pounce at any time. The second, of course, is the actual monster of downtime on a critical system. Ask most tech folks and they will tell you outages seem to only happen late at night or early in the morning. And that they do keep them up.

Entire companies and product lines have been built around providing those in the IT world with some ability to sleep at night. Modern enterprises have spent millions to mitigate the risk and prevent their businesses from having a really bad day because of an outage. Cloud providers are attuned to the downtime dilemma and spend lots of time, money, and effort to build in redundancy and make “High Availability” (HA) as easy as possible. The frequency of …

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic event occurs.

With our Remote DBA service we can take care of backups for you, what follows are some of the internals of our implementation.

What kind of outages can happen?

• Someone runs UPDATE or DELETE and forgets the where clause or filters weren’t quite right
• The application had a bug causing data to be removed or overwritten
• A table (or entire schema) was dropped …