Recovering from a bad UPDATE statement

Did you just run an UPDATE against your 10 million row users table without a WHERE clause?  Did you know that in MySQL 5.5 that sometimes you can recover from a bad UPDATE statement?  This is possible if you are running in binlog_format=ROW !

Imagine this scenario:

We run an accidental UPDATE statement that changes a row:

If we examine this UPDATE using the Binary Logging format of STATEMENT the entry would look like:

Now let’s see what it looks like if you were using the Binary Logging format of ROW:

Of interest is that the old and new versions of the changed column is stored in the binary log — in this example in @2.

This example looks trivial to fix when it is just one row changed — you don’t need anything fancy to recover from this failure case and can just run another UPDATE reversing the old and new values and be done.  But like I started out saying, what if this UPDATE statement affected all rows in your very important big table? It might look more like this:

And when we examine the binary log (still in binlog_format=ROW):

As an exercise to the reader you would then need to:

• Stop database activity (set read_only or put up a holding page on your web server, etc) so that changes are no longer hitting your database. You need time to think.
• Take a database backup if you can.
• Identify which binary log has the offending UPDATE statement.
• Parse the binary log using mysqlbinlog -vv  and match on the old version of @1 to the new version of @1, old version of @2 to the new version of @2, etc.
• Reverse the entries row entries and create new UPDATE statements that filter on the new version and SET the old version.

I hope this helps someone out there!

Note: this recovery example ONLY works when binlog_format=ROW — MIXED doesn’t help as in my testing as MySQL chooses to binlog UPDATEs in STATEMENT format when in MIXED mode.