Introducing backup locks in Percona Server

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be protected against concurrent access by queries in other connections. So Monty gave them FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, and users were enlightened.

Users then started dreaming about online backups, i.e. creating consistent snapshots of a live MySQL server. mysqldump --lock-all-tables had been a viable option for a while. To provide consistency it used FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK which was not quite the right tool for the job, but was “good enough”. Who cares if a mom-and-pop shop becomes unavailable for a few seconds required to dump ~100 MB of data, right?

With InnoDB gaining popularity users had realized that one could employ MVCC to guarantee consistency and FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK doesn’t make much sense for InnoDB tables anyway (you cannot modify InnoDB tables under a live server even if the server is read-only). So Peter gave mysqldump the --single-transaction option, and users were enlightened. mysqldump --single-transaction allowed to avoid FTWRL, but there was a few catches:

• one cannot perform any schema modifications or updates to non-InnoDB tables while mysqldump --single-transaction is in progress, because those operations are not transactional and thus would ignore the data snapshot created by --single-transaction;
• one cannot get binary log coordinates with --master-data or
  --dump-slave, because in that case FTWRL would still be used to ensure that the binary log coordinates are consistent with the data dump;

Which makes --single-transaction similar to the --no-lock option in Percona XtraBackup: it shifts the responsibility for backup consistency to the user. Any change in the workload violating the prerequisites for those options may result in a broken backup without any signs for the user to take action.

Fast forward to present day. MySQL is capable of handling over a million queries per second, MyISAM is certainly not a popular choice to store data, and there are many backup solutions to choose from. Yet all of them still rely on FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK in one way or another to guarantee consistency of .frm files, non-transactional tables and binary log coordinates.

To some extent, the problem with concurrent DDL + mysqldump --single-transaction has been alleviated with metadata locks in MySQL 5.5, which however made some users unhappy, and that behavior was partially reverted in MySQL 5.6.16 with the fix for bug #71017. But the fundamental problem is still there: mysqldump --single-transaction does not guarantee consistency with concurrent DDL statements and updates to non-transactional tables.

So the fact that FTWRL is an overkill for backups has been increasingly obvious for the reasons described below.

A lot has been written on what FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK really does. Here’s yet another walk-through in a bit more detail than described elsewhere:

1. It first invalidates the Query Cache.
2. It then waits for all in-flight updates to complete and at the same time it blocks all incoming updates. This is one problem for busy servers.
3. It then closes all open tables (the FLUSH part) and expels them from the table cache. This is also when FTWRL has to wait for all SELECT queries to complete. And this is another, even bigger problem for busy servers, because that wait happens to occur with all updates blocked. What’s even worse, the server at this stage is essentially offline, because even incoming SELECT queries will get blocked.
4. Finally, it blocks COMMITs.

Action #4 is not required for the original purpose of FTWRL, but is rather a kludge implemented due to the fact that FTWRL is (mis)used by backup utilities.

Actions #1-3 make perfect sense for the original reasons why FTWRL has been implemented. If we are going to access and possibly modify tables outside of the server, we want the server to forget everything it knows about both schema and data for all tables, and flush all in-memory buffers to make the on-disk data representation consistent.

And that’s what makes it an overkill for MySQL database backup utilities: they don’t require #1, because they never modify data. #2 is only required for non-InnoDB tables, because InnoDB provides other ways to ensure consistency for both logical and physical backups. And #3 is certainly not a problem for logical backup utilities like mysqldump or mydumper, because they don’t even access on-disk data directly. As we will see, it is not a big problem for physical backup solutions either.

So what exactly is flushed by FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK?

Nothing for InnoDB tables, and no physical backup solution require it to flush anything.

For MyISAM it is more complicated. MyISAM key caches are normally write-through, i.e. by the time each update to a MyISAM table completes, all index updates are written to disk. The only exception is delayed key writing feature which you should not be using anyway, if you care about your data. MyISAM may also do data buffering for bulk inserts, e.g. while executing multi-row INSERTs or LOAD DATA statements. Those buffers, however, are flushed between statements, so have no effect on physical backups as long as we block all statements updating MyISAM tables.

The point is that without flushing each storage engine is not any less backup-safe as it is crash-safe, with the only difference that backups are guaranteed to wait for all currently executing INSERT/REPLACE/DELETE/UPDATE statements to complete.

Enter the backup locks feature. The following 3 new SQL statements have been introduced in Percona Server:

• LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP
• LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP
• UNLOCK BINLOG

mysqldump got a new option, --lock-for-backup which along with --single-transaction essentially obsoletes --lock-all-tables (i.e. FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK). It makes mysqldump use LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP before it starts dumping tables to block all “unsafe” statement that might otherwise interfere with backup consistency.

Of course, that requires backup locks support by the target server, so mysqldump checks if they are indeed supported and fails with an error if they are not.

However, at the moment if binary lock coordinates are requested with --master-data, FTWRL is still used even if --lock-for-backup is specified. mysqldump could use LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP, but there’s a better solution for logical backups implemented in MariaDB, which has already been ported to Percona Server and queued for the next release.

There is also another important difference between just mysqldump --single-transaction and mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. As of MySQL 5.5 mysqldump --single-transaction acquires shared metadata locks on all tables processed within the transaction. Which will also block DDL statements on those tables when they will try to acquire an exclusive lock. So far, so good. The problems start when there’s an incoming SELECT query against a table that already has a pending DDL statement. It will also be blocked on a pending exclusive MDL request for no apparent reasons. Which was one of the complaints in bug #71017.

It’s better illustrated with an example. Suppose there are 3 sessions: one created by mysqldump, and 2 user sessions.

This is what would happen with mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction:

This immediate problem was partially fixed in MySQL 5.6.16 by releasing metadata locks after processing each table with the help of savepoints. There is a couple of issues with this approach:

• there is still a table metadata lock for the duration of SELECT executed by mysqldump. Which, as before, blocks DDL. So there is still a chance that mysqldump --single-transaction may eventually block SELECT queries.
• after the table is processed and the metadata lock is released, there is now an opportunity for RENAME to break the backup, see bug #71214.

Both issues above along with bug #71215 and bug #71216 do not exist with mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction as all kinds of DDL statements are properly isolated by backup locks, which do not block SELECT queries at the same time.

Percona XtraBackup 2.2 will support backup locks and use them automatically if supported by the server being backed up.

The current locking used by XtraBackup is:

With backup locks it becomes:

Note that under the following conditions, no blocking occurs at any stage in the server:

• no updates to non-transactional tables;
• no DDL;
• binary log is disabled;

They may look familiar, because they are essentially prerequisites for the --no-lock option. Except that with backup locks, you don’t have to take chances and take responsibility for backup consistency. All the locking will be handled automatically by the server, if and when it is necessary.

mylvmbackup takes the server read-only with FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK while the snapshot is being created for two reasons:

• flush non-transactional tables
• ensure consistency with the binary log coordinates

For exactly the same reasons as with XtraBackup, it can use backup locks instead of FTWRL.

mydumper developers may want to add support for backup locks as well. mydumper relies on START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT to ensure InnoDB consistency, but has to resort to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to ensure consistency of non-InnoDB tables and binary log coordinates.

Another problem is that START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT is not supposed to be used by multi-threaded logical backup utilities. But that is an opportunity for another server-side improvement and probably a separate blog post.