I think I got you idea, and it should be possible to implement, but it is not easy ..

You may contact us http://www.percona.com/contacts.html
for discussion how we can proceed.

Thank you for this excellent post and some really exciting work with XtraDB.

Would there be any way to achieve the same transfer of a database from one server to another without making an explicit duplicate (backup) copy of the InnoDB data files on the first server in the process?

I’m considering this in the context of a cluster of machines running XtraDB where we want to “stream” backups of databases from one node (A) to another (B) by using ZFS snapshots rather than query-based MySQL replication. I’d be happy with a short write-block period on A during which the .ibd and .ext files are prepared *in-situ* (so we don’t need to wait while we copy gigabytes of data) and then a snapshot of them is made, at which point the database can un-block and the snapshot can be transmitted to B. Then upon receipt of the snapshot B can do steps 3-7 to get a consistent backup.

I guess my question is: can XtraBackup be configured / easily patched to do its –export –prepare magic on live XtraDB files rather than a backup copy of them, on the assumption that it’s okay to initiate a write lock on that database for the duration of its action? Also, could XtraDB cope with these files being modified while it’s running?

I’d be very interested to hear any thoughts you have on this.

Best Regards,
Luke Marsden
Hybrid Logic Ltd.

http://www.hybrid-cluster.com – Next-generation cloud web hosting

When some feature is comming so one can do EXPORT TABLESPACE or something similar from MySQL/MariaDB directly ?
I think this will make such feature much more useful

Yes, it’s not problem, but again it should be running XtraDB (or InnoDB with patch)

Ex: Copy schema1.test_table to schema2.test_table

For now XtraDB is almost fully compatible with InnoDB table format and backward. So you can import table to XtraDB and after that start InnoDB instance on database.