Few years ago I was looking at crash recovery code, and realized that InnoDB has removed all the comments from the code [this assumption is debunked by Heikki in comments section], related to replay of transaction log. Judging by high quality of comments in the remaining codebase, I realized that it was all done to obscure any efforts to build another InnoDB hot backup solution – competitor to first Innobase standalone offering.
I was enjoying the moment when Percona launched their own implementation of the tool. Since the inception, it became more and more robust and feature rich.
We have used xtrabackup in our environment a lot – just… not for backup – the major use case right now is for cloning server instances – either for building new replicas, shadow servers, or …
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