The title is not entirely true, but ‘FTWRL on MyDumper is not needed anymore for consistent backups’ was a long title. One more time, I wanted to share a new feature in MyDumper. This is related to an important piece: the locking mechanism that mydumper uses to sync all the threads.

MyDumper was born because, at that time, we didn’t have a tool that could take a consistent logical backup using multiple threads. Syncing all the threads was one of the problems, which has been solved using FLUSH TABLE WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL), til all the threads execute START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT (STWCS), then we release the FTWRL and all the threads are in sync. We all know that FTWRL is very expensive and difficult to acquire on some database workloads.

I started to think about alternatives to avoid using FTWRL, and my first thought was, why …

As you might know, mysqldump is single-threaded and STDOUT is its default output. As MyDumper is multithreaded, it has to write on different files. Since version 0.11.3 was released in Nov 2021, we have the possibility to stream our backup in MyDumper. We thought for several months until we decided what was the simplest way to implement it and we also had to add support for compression. So, after fixing several bugs, and we now consider it is stable enough, we can explain how it works.

How Can You Stream if MyDumper is Multithreaded?

Receiving a stream is not a problem for myloader, it receives a file at a time and sends it to a thread to process it. However, each worker thread in mydumper is connected to the database, and as soon as it reads data, it should be sent to the stream, which might cause collisions with other worker threads that are reading data from the database. In order to avoid this issue, we ended up with the …

For a long time, MyDumper has been in Max Bubenick’s personal GitHub repository. Now, we decided to move to a new MyDumper’s Organization as requested earlier this year by a user from the community.

There were also two other reasons why we decided to move it. The first one is related to how the project is evolving, and the second is that it will allow us to implement integrations to other projects.

We can see the evolution of the project, noting the increase in commits of the last year:

We tried to keep the release cycle every two months, focusing on closing as many bugs as possible and implementing new features requested. It was not an easy task, as lots of changes had to be implemented in mydumper and myloader engine to allow the new features to be developed. 

The new MyDumper 0.11.3 version, which includes many new features and bug fixes, is now available.  You can download the code from here.

We are very proud to announce that we were able to achieve the two main objectives for the milestone ZSTD and Stream support!  We added four packages with ZSTD support because not all the distributions have support for v1.4 or higher. Package libzstd is required to use ZSTD compression. ZSTD Bullseye package is only available with libraries for Percona Server for MySQL 8.0. There are two main use cases for the Stream functionality:

• Importing while you are exporting
• Remote backups
…

The new MyDumper 0.11.1 version, which includes many new features and bug fixes, is now available.  You can download the code from here.

For this release, there are three main changes: 1) we added config file functionality which allows users to set session-level variables (one of the most requested features!), 2) we developed a better and robust import mechanism, and 3) we fixed all the filename related issues.  Those changes and mostly the last one forced us to change the version number from 0.10.9 to 0.11.1 as a backup taken in 0.10.x will not work in 0.11.x and vice versa.

New Features:

• Adding order by part functionality #388
…

The new MyDumper 0.10.7 version, which includes many new features and bug fixes, is now available.  You can download the code from here.

For this release, we have added several features like WHERE support that is required for partial backups. We also added CHECKSUM for tables which help to speed up the restore of large tables to take advantage of fast index creation, and more.

New Features:

• Adding metadata file per table that contains the number of rows #353
• Adding –where support #347 …

The new MyDumper 0.10.5 version, which includes many new features and bug fixes, is now available.  You can download the code from here.

For this release, we focused on fixing some old issues and testing old pull requests to get higher quality code. On releases 0.10.1, 0.10.3, and 0.10.5, we released the packages compiled against MySQL 5.7 libraries, but from now on, we are also compiling against MySQL 8 libraries for testing purposes, not releasing, as we think that more people in the community will start compiling against the latest version, and we should be prepared.

New Features:

• Password obfuscation #312
• Using …

MySQL databases keep getting larger and larger. And the larger the databases get, the harder it is to backup and restore them.  MyDumper has changed the way that we perform logical backups to enable you to restore tables or objects from large databases. Over the years it has evolved into a tool that we use at Percona to back up petabytes of data every day. It has several features, but the most important one, from my point of view, is how it speeds up the entire process of export and import.

Until the beginning of this year, the latest release was from 2018; yes, more than two years without any release. However, we started 2021 with release v0.10.1 in January, with all the merges up to that point and we committed ourselves to release every two months… and we delivered! …

Oftentimes, we need to replicate between Amazon Aurora and an external MySQL server. The idea is to start by taking a point-in-time copy of the dataset. Next, we can configure MySQL replication to roll it forward and keep the data up-to-date.

This process is documented by Amazon, however, it relies on the mysqldump method to create the initial copy of the data. If the dataset is in the high GB/TB range, this single-threaded method could take a very long time. Similarly, there are ways to improve the import phase (which can easily take 2x the time of the export).

Let’s explore some tricks to significantly improve the speed of this process.

Preparation Steps

The first step is to enable binary logs in Aurora. Go to the Cluster-level parameter group and make sure binlog_format …

In the last few years there have been several examples of major service problems affecting businesses data: outages causing data inconsistencies; unavailability or data loss, and worldwide cyberattacks encrypting your files and asking for a ransom.

Database-related incidents are a very common industry issue- even if the root cause is not the database system itself. No matter if your main relational system is MySQL, MariaDB, PostgresQL or AWS Aurora -there will be a time where you will need to make use of backups to recover to a previous state. And when that happens it will be the worst time to realize that your backup system hadn’t been working for months, or testing for the first time a cluster-wide recovery.

Forget about the backups, it is all about recovery!

Let me be 100% clear: the question is not IF data …