Let’s continue our journey of deploying the MySQL Database System on OCI with Terraform.
This time we will see how we can use a backup (see [1] and [2]) as a source (initial data) for a new instance.

Within the oci_mysql_mysql_db_system it’s possible to define a source detailing how to provision the initial data of the db system.

Let’s deploy a new MySQL Database Instance using a manual backup we made earlier:

We can also find the backup’s ocid using the oci cli command:

 $ oci mysql backup list …

Recently I wrote an article on how to define a backup policy for MySQL Database Service in OCI using Terraform. We saw that it was possible to define tags (defined_tags and freeform_tags) in the backup_policy section of a oci_mysql_mysql_db_system resource.

However, it seems that these tags are never used for manual or automated backups in the MySQL Database Service backup process. In the strategy implemented on OCI, the backups inherit the tags from the MySQL DB system itself.

This means that if you want to have some custom tags on your backups, you need to specify them in the MySQL Database resource like this (on line 12):

resource "oci_mysql_mysql_db_system" "MDSinstance" {
    admin_password = var.admin_password
    admin_username = …

With Terraform OCI provider 4.90.0 (released August 24th, 2022), we have added the possibility to specify the value of editable configuration variables directly from Terraform.

These variables must be defined in a resource of type oci_mysql_mysql_configuration like this:

resource "oci_mysql_mysql_configuration" "mds_mysql_configuration" {
        #Required
        compartment_id = var.compartment_ocid
    shape_name   = var.mysql_shape

         …