This blog post discusses the business continuity plan around MySQL backups, and how organizations should think about them.

During the years I’ve worked in IT, I’ve learned that backups sometimes are a conceptual subject in organizations. Many companies have them, but don’t document the associated business continuation plan for them. I experienced this the hard way many many years ago, somewhere around when MySQL 5.0 was still widely used.

In most organizations, there are a couple of business continuity subjects that should be described internally. For example, what is the recovery time objective and what is the recovery point objective. Let’s go a bit deeper into both concepts:

Recovery Point Objective:

A recovery point objective describes the utter limit of time data …

In my previous post, I used incremental backups in Percona XtraBackup as a method for rebuilding a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) node without triggering an actual SST. Practically this reproduces the SST steps, but it can be handy if you already had backups available to use.

In this post, I want to present another methodology for this that also uses a full backup, but instead of incrementals uses any binary logs that the cluster may be producing.

Binary logs on PXC

Binary logs are not strictly needed in PXC for replication, but …

Beware the SST

In Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) I often run across users who are fearful of SSTs on their clusters. I’ve always maintained that if you can’t cope with a SST, PXC may not be right for you, but that doesn’t change the fact that SSTs with multiple Terabytes of data can be quite costly.

SST, by current definition, is a full backup of a Donor to Joiner.  The most popular method is Percona XtraBackup, so we’re talking about a donor node that must:

1. Run a full XtraBackup that reads its entire datadir
2. Keep up with Galera replication to it as much as possible (though laggy donors don’t send flow control)
3. Possibly still be serving application traffic if you don’t remove Donors from rotation.
…

It’s important to monitor the (database) backups after you set-it-up. In this post we will answer a few how to monitor MySQL Database backups solutions – monitoring methods. We should…

The post How to monitor MySQL backups first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

Whether you’re working with MySQL, MySQL Cluster, or any other RDBMS, every database with a requirement for persistent data should always have a backup. As a Production DBA you’re the insurance policy to safeguard the data. Bad things do happen. Backups are your safety net to ensure you always have a way to recover should the worst happen and the database becomes irreparable.

There are many ways to produce a consistent backup of MySQL, I have listed a few of the options available below; Remember backups are your safety net, failing to retrieve a consistent backup when you need it most can be a very career limiting move, so no matter what backup method you choose always test your backups!

Logical Backups
The ever popular mysqldump is a backup and export utility provided with the MySQL binaries …

A while ago I blogged about using Mercurial as a backup repository for my databases. I was asked about this again
last night over dinner.

This is an example of what I see via the web:




I can see both changes to schema, and do deltas between days (aka slice out a days worth of data or grab a snapshot of anyone one particular days data). The nice thing with hgweb is that I can make this happen via my browser :)

Part of what really makes this work is the --tab option to mysqldump (I also use Innodb so my backups are all done online). I can compress it, but frankly disk is cheap and storing deltas is cheap :)