February 22, 2012

Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t

Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file.  You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:

Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta

Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta is now available for download. This release adds additional functionality to Percona XtraBackup 1.4, the current general availability version of XtraBackup. This is a beta release. Functionality Added or Changed Support for MySQL 5.5 databases has been implemented. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) XtraBackup can now be built from the MySQL 5.1.52, MySQL 5.5.7, or Percona Server [...]

Percona XtraBackup 1.4

Percona XtraBackup 1.4 is now available for download. Version 1.4 fixes problems related to incremental backups. If you do incremental backups, it’s strongly recommended that you upgrade to this release. Functionality Added or Changed Incremental backups have changed and now allow the restoration of full backups containing certain rollback transactions that previously caused problems. Please [...]

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

An argument for not using mysqldump

I have a 5G mysqldump which takes 30 minutes to restore from backup.  That means that when the database reaches 50G, it should take 30×10=5 hours to restore.  Right?  Wrong.

Why you can’t rely on a replica for disaster recovery

A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues and I worked on a data corruption case that reminded me that sometimes people make unsafe assumptions without knowing it. This one involved SAN snapshotting that was unsafe. In a nutshell, the client used SAN block-level replication to maintain a standby/failover MySQL system, and there was [...]

Recover BLOB fields

For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]

How fast is FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK?

A week or so ago at the MySQL conference, I visited one of the backup vendors in the Expo Hall. I started to chat with them about their MySQL backup product. One of the representatives told me that their backup product uses FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, which he admitted takes a global lock on [...]

xtrabackup-1.2

Dear Community, The notice is hereby given that next version 1.2 of XtraBackup software is released. The list of changes in this version includes: Changelog: XtraBackup supports now XtraDB 10 tar4ibd supports variable page size and fast_checksum of XtraDB Supported 32bit platform for Centos 5, Centos 4, Debian lenny and etch, Ubuntu Karmic, Jaunty, Intrepid, [...]

Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup

If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]