Backups are an integral and very important part of any system. Backups allow you to recover your data and be up and running again, in the advent of problems such as system crashes, hardware failures or users deleting data by mistake. I had been evaluating backup solution for a while but to be honest I really wasn't satisfied with the solutions available until I came across XtraBackup and I am loving it since. In this post I intend on showing how to do backups and restores using XtraBackup.

I have just released PBXT 1.0.09 RC3. Besides bug fixes (details in the release notes), this version includes 2 Beta features:

• XA/2-Phase Commit support
• Native online backup Driver

XA support has been around MySQL for quite a while, and we all know of it usefulness, for example when sharding. So I was surprised to find a bug in the XA recovery: Bug #47134. Contrary to what is reported, the crash can also occur when using XA with just the default engines installed, so watch out for that one (the good news: the bug fix is simple).

Online backup is really cool! I have heard that it may soon be released in a coming version of 5.4, so lets hope that this is true.

In a little test, I did a backup of a 10GB database in 49.26 seconds! …

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

In 3 words:

They already do.

MySQL Enterprise is more than just a binary. http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/ has the details on the other features MySQL Enterprise includes.

One of these features is the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which is closed source, proprietary alerting software.

So when bloggers make statements such as:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model ? previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being …

There’s quite a bit of buzz on the blogosphere from people I respect a great deal, like Jeremy Cole at Proven Scaling and Vadim at Percona, about MySQL’s new Enterprise backup plans.  

The big deal?  They’re releasing a Community version that doesn’t have all the same features as the Enterprise version of Online Backup, including compression and encryption.  The Community version is open-sourced under GPL, the Enterprise version is not.

Personally, I think this is awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I love open source.  We couldn’t have built our business without it, and we love it when we get a chance to contribute back to the community.

But …