Thanks to all who attended my webinar today. The session was recorded and will be available to watch for free soon here. There were a lot of great questions asked during the session, so I’d like to take this opportunity to try to answer a few of them: Q: Is there an easy way to [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA
I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
What Are Full, Incremental, and Differential Backups?
Sometimes you might hear people talk about full backups, and differential backups versus incremental backups. What is the difference? A full backup is pretty self-explanatory. It makes a copy of all of your MySQL data. A differential backup, on the other hand, simply records the differences since your last full backup. The advantage of taking [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
xtrabackup-0.8
Dear community, The release 0.8 of the opensource backup tool for InnoDB and XtraDB is available for download. Key features: New mode of innobackupex –stream=tar4ibd; new command tar4ibd based on libtar-1.2.11 Experimental option –export is added (see Vadim’s post “Impossible – possible, moving InnoDB tables between servers”for details) tar4ibd is made to be sure that [...]
xtrabackup-0.5, bugfixes, incremental backup introduction
I am happy to announce next build of our backup tool. This version contains several bugfixes and introduces initial implementation of incremental backup. Incremental backup works in next way. When you do regular backup, at the end of procedure you can see output:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | The latest check point (for incremental): '1319:813219999' >> log scanned up to (1319 813701532) Transaction log of lsn (1318 3034677302) to (1319 813701532) was copied. 090404 06:03:29 innobackupex: All tables unlocked 090404 06:03:29 innobackupex: Connection to database server closed innobackupex: Backup created in directory '/mnt/data/tmp' innobackupex: MySQL binlog position: filename 'db02-bin.001271', position 247627478 090404 06:07:58 innobackupex: innobackup completed OK! innobackupex: You must use -i (--ignore-zeros) option for extraction of the tar stream. |
which gives start point 1319:813219999 for further incremental backup. This point [...]
xtrabackup-0.3, binaries and stream backup
We are coming with next version of xtrabackup – online backup solution for MySQL 5.0 / 5.1 and InnoDB standard version, plugin modification and XtraDB. We still consider it as alpha version, though it shows perfect stable results in our tests. Let me address two often asked question about xtrabackup: 1) Does it work only [...]
Percona XtraBackup: Open Source Alternative for InnoDB Hot Backup call for ideas
For long time as main backup solution for MySQL on Linux we have been using LVM snapshots. Performance concerns from performance critical envinronment caused us to do LVM performance research which showed horrible results forcing us to look at more performing alternatives. Innodb Hot Backup is a good working solution but it is not Open [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

