After some sprint coding and testing I am more than happy to declare Xtrabackup getting into alpha stage. And alpha means more that we have some dirty hacks in code / not fully scripted builds / not fully tested all MySQL versions, but backups work just fine! I am able to backup our production box and restore it!
As there were some questions how xtrabackup works, let me explain it: it is supposed to be online, non-blocking backup solution for InnoDB / XtraDB engines for MySQL 5.0 / 5.1 versions. Currently we tested only for 5.0.75 / 5.0.77 and it works just fine. We also modified innobackup script ( thanks InnoDB for making it GPL), so it can be used to backup of MyISAM tables also.
Beside standard –backup and –prepare options we have implemented –throttle to limit IO activity during backup, so we do not hurt production box by intensive file copying operations.
As for now it is available only in source code version on Launchpad lp:~percona-dev/percona-xtrabackup/alpha-0.2 , after some polishing and more testing we will prepare binary builds. Test it if you can and send us feedback. Enjoy!
If in understand correctly it should be working for standard InnoDB tables, shouldn’t it? If so, I shall be able test it on an some MySQL servers (5.0.51 in production and 5.0.67 in development) next monday.
Julien,
Right, it should work with standard InnoDB tables.
Can’t wait to check it out! What are the db performance implications while the backup is being taken? How does the speed of the backup compare to mysqldump or LVM? What kind of compression does it use?
Gil,
You can test it right now!
We did not check performance implication yet, but on quick look it does not hurt production a lot.
There is no compression yet, it is in short TODO list.
Throttling is indeed a very nice feature to have.
Speaking of which (and speaking about nice ;), would it be possible to have the option to use “ionice -c3” on linux, to lower I/O priority of the backup process while keeping it able to use resources when there’s resources available (as opposed to a hard IOPS upper bound limit)?
Another throttling ability that would be useful, if Xtrabackup works by copying files and plans to have the option to make use of rsync, would be to expose the “–bwlimit” rsync option to end user. That would help to prevent saturating block or network bandwidth.
Maybe is not too late 🙂
– Purge (autom. removal of old backups)
– Email Notification
Great job guys, not only with xtrabackup but with all the efforts made by Percona!
Congratulations and thank you very much.
Regards,
chopeta