Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use less power whenever possible! – but the time it takes some drives to “wake up” again is longer than a RAID setup is willing to tolerate.

First of all, you may wonder why I bother with SATA disks at all for RAID. I’ve written about this before, but they simply deliver plenty for much less money. Higher RPM doesn’t necessarily help you for a db-related (random access) workload, and for tasks like backups which do have a lot of speed may not be a primary concern. SATA disks have a shorter command queue than SAS, so that means they might need to seek more – however a smart RAID controller would already arrange its I/O …

Yesterday I was discussing with a fellow DBA about ways to check the status of existing and/or past RMAN jobs. Good backup scripts usually write their output to some sort of log file so, checking the output is usually a straight-forward task. However, backup jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be tricky if you don’t know the environment well.
Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of accessing that information, thus, may come handy.

Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.

Backup jobs’ status and metadata

A lot of metadata about …

All DBAs understand the importance and priority of quick, reliable database backup and recovery operations.  In fact, dating back to my early days with MySQL, the most commonly requested product features from the MySQL user base have been around online, non-blocking backup solutions for running MySQL servers.  In response, Oracle now provides MySQL Enterprise Backup ("MEB") which performs high performant, online "hot" backups for MySQL databases.  MEB provides all of the backup/recovery features and functionality DBAs expect, all from a scriptable command line interface.  You can learn all about MEB in the related MySQL docs.

My congratulations and appreciation go out to Lars Thalmann and the MySQL Enterprise Backup engineering team for the …

I spent my day doing updates to the automysqlbackup script.  Here is some of what I’ve added over the last year.

The bug number fixes are from SourceForge.  https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=628964&group_id=101066&func=browse

# 2.5.5 MTG – (2011-07-21)
#    – Bug – Typo Ureadable Unreadable config file line 424 – ID: 3316825
#    – Bug – Change “#!/bin/bash” to “#!/usr/bin/env bash” – ID: 3292873
#    – Bug – problem with excludes – ID: 3169562
#    – Bug – Total disk space on symbolic links – ID: 3064547
#    – Added DEBUG option to only print the commands that will be executed.
#    – Bug – WHICH command didn’t work if there …

MySQL organizes all the data as tables, irrespective of storage engine used. If you are using MySQL with InnoDB tables, these tables might get corrupt due to hardware faults, unexpected power failure, MySQL code errors, kernel bugs and other similar reasons. In such cases, InnoDB will typically give some errors indicating table corruption. As a data restoration source, you will need to use your latest database backup. But in case if backup fails to restore required information or doesn’t exist, you should scan your damaged database using third-party MySQL Repair or MySQL Recovery tools.

You might encounter the similar error message while accessing an InnoDB table:

“#1033 - Incorrect information in file: '"table name" .frm”

MySQL crashes after you receive this error message.

Cause: You receive this error message if …

MySQL Backup: Table By Table Backup With Auto Rotation, For Easy Restoration Of Partial/Full Database

Here is a MySQL backup script which can take table by table backups (individual backup files of each table of each database) in a compressed format. It also provides an automatic rotation of old backup files.  The backup script handles innodb and myisam tables separately.

LVM (Logical Volume Management) is a very important tool to have in the toolkit of a MySQL DBA. It allows you to create and extend logical volumes on the fly. This allows me to, say, add another disk and extend a partition effortlessly. The other very important feature is the ability to take snapshots, that you can then use for backups. All in all its a must have tool. Hence, this guide will allow you to understand various terminologies associated with LVM, together with setting up LVM volumes and in a later part will also show you how to extend...

Listening to the OurSQL podcast: Repli-cans and Repli-can’ts got me thinking, what are the issues with MySQL replication that Sarah and Sheeri didn’t have the time to include in their episode. Here’s my list:
Replication Capacity Index This is a concept introduced by Percona in last year’s post: Estimating Replication Capacity which I revisited briefly during my presentation at this year’s MySQL Users Conference. Why is this important? Very …

Previously in the backup series:

Backup Series #1: Backup Glossary
Backup Series #2: Backup Tools You Already Have (mysqlhotcopy and mysqldump)
Backup Series #3: Looking Through the Lenz (snapshots including LVM)
Backup Series #4: Advanced Logical Export Features (advanced mysqldump)
Backup Series #5: Xtrabackup

This week we talk with Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda, about how Zmanda Recovery Manager makes backup and recovery of MySQL backups very easy, whether you are using storage level snapshots, hot backup tools or even logical backups. Full and incremental backups (and …

With this revision, My xtrabackup branch has been merged into trunk.

What does this mean? It means that we now get a drizzlebackup.innobase binary which is the xtrabackup port for Drizzle. Exciting times.