What is a Delay Replica and how does it help?

MySQL Replication is useful, easy to set up, and used for very different purposes. For example:

• split reads and writes
• run data mining or reporting processes on them
• disaster recovery

To learn more, check out How Does MySQL Replication Work?

It’s important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the source, for example, a DROP DATABASE or an UPDATE without a WHERE clause will be replicated nearly instantly to all replica servers. Simply having a replica is not going to be helpful here. How can we avoid that kind of mistake? By having a replica server that intentionally lags behind.

We can never avoid human error in database infrastructure operations. But …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how to execute a MySQL single table Point-In-Time Recovery.

I recently wrote a blog post describing a different way of doing Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR). If you want to know the step by step, please visit the mentioned blog post. Here is a quick summary of the approach:

1. Restore the backup on the desired server
2. Create a fake master
3. Copy all relevant binlogs to the fake master
4. Configure server from the first step as a slave from a fake master

In addition to the above steps, there is a similar approach …

In this blog, I’ll look at how to do MySQL point in time recovery (PITR) correctly.

Sometimes we need to restore from a backup, and then replay the transactions that happened after the backup was taken. This is a common procedure in most disaster recovery plans, when for example you accidentally drop a table/database or run an update/delete without the “where” clause and lose data.

The usual way is to get a copy of your binlogs and use mysqlbinlog to replay those transactions. But this approach has many pitfalls that can make the whole PITR process a nightmare. Some examples:

• You need to make sure to run a single mysqlbinlog command with all related binlogs, and pipe them to mysql at once. Otherwise, if binlog.000001 creates a temporary table, and …