Comments on: 10 things you need to know about backup solutions for MySQL

By: Maurizio Di Ianni

Maurizio Di Ianni — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:36:11 +0000

A great thing would be that you can transform a mysqldump file with extended inserts to a load data outfile format file. If there is someone who knows something about it… I tell you this taking care about the 10 reasons explained before and thinking on a server with huge databases, with millions of rows per table (100GB).

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:25:04 +0000

/me unsubscribes from spammer list that aforesaid backup provider subscribed him to after downloading the whitepaper.

By: rgmarcha

rgmarcha — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:57:06 +0000

Baron, I’m a customer of R1Soft (www.r1soft.com), and so far my backups are good enough that I use them regularly to spawn new slaves.

Their backup solution works tracking modified blocks in a filesystem (I have used only ext3) with a kernel driver. So, after a FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, they take a snapshot of the state of the blocks in the filesystem, and those are the blocks’ versions put into the backup. So, it seems it should be equivalent to a LVM snapshot.

The speed of the restore, though fast, is not optimal, but I think it’s because the CPU is the bottleneck decompressing the backup data. I haven’t tested a mysql restore from a non-compressed backup to compare.

By: Eric Brunson

Eric Brunson — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:40:11 +0000

I’m working on a backup strategy for my company, so this set of questions is both timely and appreciated.

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:18:23 +0000

Great point. But 10 is such a nice number for linkbait headlines! Heh.

By: Jens-Petter Salvesen

Jens-Petter Salvesen — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:17:13 +0000

There is a big item that’s missing: Recovery time. It’s nearly useless to have a consistent backup if it takes two days to restore and you can only afford two hours of downtime..

Otherwise a good, useful article as always!

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:35:45 +0000

Ronald, I haven’t evaluated the backup functionality in MySQL 6 well enough to have an informed opinion about it, sorry

By: William Newton

William Newton — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:05:21 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything by reading a whitepaper. And if you have to register first before reading it? Even more worthless. I hope someone at Mysql takes not of this fact. They’ve got white pages all over the place all of which require a registration. If you have valuable information, just present it in an easy to use format: like a web page.

By: Ronald Bradford

Ronald Bradford — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:24:10 +0000

Baron,

Do you consider the online backup solution proposed in MySQL 6 to be capable of addressing these points?

It’s amazing that online backup has been the single greatest request from customers and users for many years, yet MySQL (company) has failed to deliver a working solution.

MySQL lacks a single unbreakable backup solution (for example in comparison to Oracle), and I see no solution close to solving this long standing fundamental problem in the near future.

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:47:49 +0000

With InnoDB, yes there are. You should read the MySQL manual for details.