My travel schedule is getting quite crowded for the next months - I just received confirmation that I will be speaking at the phpDay in Verona, Italy on May 15-16th. I'll be talking about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system as well as MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices in the developer track of the conference. I've never been to Verona, but it seems like it's a beautiful city. I look forward to being there!

That should read “Talks, Talks, Talks” … There will be several presentations by InnoDB experts at the upcoming 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced DBA deeply familiar with InnoDB, you won’t want to miss these important talks about InnoDB:

• Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection by Ken and Heikki, Tues, 11:55am
• Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB by Heikki, Wed, 2pm
• InnoDB Internals: InnoDB File Formats & Source Code Structure by Heikki and Calvin, Wed, 5:15pm
• …

InnoDB executes a lot of transactions for MySQL users. And users and technical experts in the InnoDB community exchange lots of information about InnoDB … transacting in ideas … all the time. A great opportunity to participate in some of these transactions is the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo.

Does your InnoDB-based application need more transactions to execute more quickly and reliably? Come hear these noted speakers present information that can help you get the most out of InnoDB:

• Distributed InnoDB Caching w/memcached — Matthew Yonkovit & Yves Trudeau (MySQL), Tue 2pm
• InnoDB database recovery techniques — Peter Zaitsev (MySQL Performance Blog), Wed 3:05pm
• …

Sometimes, you want to backup individual databases in MySQL to move to a different server. This part is easy using mysqldump:

shell> mysqldump -u root -p --databases db1 db2 ... > backup.sql

The problem is, what happens when you want to backup the permissions associated with these databases? Well, here are a few queries to help you out.

-- Grab the users with global permissions, 
-- with permissions to the databases you want, 
-- and tables/stored procedures in it.
mysql> SELECT u.* INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/user.txt'
        FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' ESCAPED BY '\\'
        LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
        FROM
                mysql.user u
        WHERE
                u.Select_priv='Y'
        UNION
        SELECT u.*
        FROM
                mysql.user u,
                mysql.db d
        WHERE
                d.Db IN('db1', 'db2', ...) AND
                d.User = u.user
        UNION
        SELECT u.* …

Well, here we are … the first post to the InnoDB blog.   Now there is a blog dedicated solely to InnoDB products and technology. The Innobase team will be posting here regularly on all manner of topics regarding the InnoDB storage engine.  We plan to provide timely updates and important technical information about InnoDB-related products including the built-in InnoDB distributed by MySQL, the InnoDB Plugin and InnoDB Hot Backup.  We invite you to visit regularly and post your comments.

We’ve borrowed the name “Transactions on” from the computer-science journal Transactions on Database Systems, published by the ACM society for computing professionals.  Like that journal, this blog will cover a wide range of database topics, specifically as they relate to InnoDB.

Users of InnoDB know a transaction is an atomic all-or-nothing set of changes made to a collection of data.  But …

Today I gave my first MySQL University session as a speaker, talking about Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. The talk went quite well (at least that was my impression) and we had ~10 people attending. The slides (PDF) and a recording of the session are now available from the Wiki page. Unfortunately the recording lacks the audio track, which is a bit of a bummer. We've submitted a support request with the DimDim folks, so hopefully they can provide us with a complete recording.

There was one question during the session that I was not able to answer myself, so I'm asking for your …

This Thursday (February 26th, 14:00 UTC), Lenz Grimmer will give a MySQL University session on Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. Lenz is a member of the MySQL Community team and the maintainer of the mylvmbackup tool. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

For MySQL University sessions, point …

Sorry for the downtime of this site - until around a week ago I hosted my home page on a trusty Genesi Pegasos II system (powered by a PowerPC G4 Processor clocked at 1GHz, using Debian 4.0 PPC with 512 MB of RAM), serving these pages from my home DSL connection. Unfortunately this system provided no means of redundancy - the hard disk drive died.

Luckily I perform frequent backups, so I moved most parts of the site to a shared hosting space now - the picture gallery is unfortunately too big to fit into the space that I have there. I'll try to move the pictures into my Flickr account instead, but this will take some time.

Note that the primary domain name of this site is now lenzg.net - lenzg.org, (the …

• 
  
• Consistent backup:
  A consistent backup is one that represents a snapshot of all data at a point in time. Consistent backups are used for disaster recovery. An inconsistent backup can be useful for retrieving partial data — for example, if a long-time customer accidentally deletes information from his profile, you can go back to an inconsistent backup and retrieve that information. It is not important that all the data be consistent with each other when retrieving a partial amount of point-in-time data.
• Logical backups:
  Logical backups are backups that contain SQL statements to create and populate tables. In MySQL, logical backups can only be done while mysqld is running, and are usually done with the mysqldump tool. mysqldump can logically export (”dump”) multiple databases, tables, views, stored routines, triggers and events. It can …

A while back, Ted Ts’o asked for a incremental backup solution that used a database. It reminded me of the talk at the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, titled Build your own MySQL time machine.

Chuck and Mats will talk about the backup and replication code, and will show off a web interface, that allows you to go back in time, similar to Apple’s Time Machine in Mac OS X. Its a talk that I most certainly want to attend, as an avid Time Machine user.

Register for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 before February 16, and you’ll get an early bird discount (saving $200). …