Thank you for attending my July 15 webinar, “Creating Best in Class Backup solutions for your MySQL environment.” Due to the amount of content we discussed and some minor technical difficulties faced near the end of webinar we have decided to cover the final two slides of the presentation along with the questions asked by attendees during the webinar via this blog post.

The slides are available for download. And you can watch the webinar in it’s entirety here.

The final two slides were about our tips for having a …

Have you ever wondered what could happen if your MySQL database goes down?

Although it’s evident such a crash will cause downtime – and surely some business impact in terms of revenue – can you do something to reduce this impact?

The simple answer is “yes” by doing regular backups (of course) but are you 100% sure that your current backup strategy will really come through when an outage occurs? And how much precious time will pass (and how much revenue will be lost) before you get your business back online?

I usually think of backups as the step after HA fails. Let’s say we’re in M<>M replication and something occurs that kills the db but the HA can’t save the day. Let’s pretend that the UPS fails and those servers are completely out. You can’t failover; you have to restore data. Backups are a key piece of “Business Continuity.” Also factor in the frequent need to restore data that’s been …

One of the routine tasks for a DBA is renaming database schemas, and as such MySQL added a command to carry out that purpose called “RENAME DATABASE <database_name>”. However this command just made it through a few minor releases before being discontinued (from MySQL 5.1.7 to 5.1.23). Here’s a link to the reference manual regarding the command http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/rename-database.html. Vadim wrote a MySQL Performance Blog post about this a few years ago where he mentions the dangerous nature of this command – that post was appropriately headlined, “Dangerous Command.” Today we will see what are the ways in which a database schema can be renamed and which of them is the quickest.

Method 1: A …