You’ve probably had some troubles with the shared InnoDB tablespace stored in the ibdata file. Especially when it has grown for some reasons and reached a critical size.

This behavior occurs in some cases, due to excessive rollback segments growth or during a migration from a unique shared tablespace to a file-per-table configuration for example.

In this post, I would like to explain how to shrink the ibdata file after an unwanted file growth in a file-per-table configuration.
Note that the process could be done without Trite but the tool avoids to write the script used to transport tables yourself.

Initial situation

Here is a sample of the InnoDB configuration:

innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:100M:autoextend
innodb_file_per_table

And the status of your datafiles in the datadir directory:

drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4,0K déc. 20 2012 …

Mysqldump is a fantastic tool for backing up and restoring small and medium sized MySQL tables and databases quickly. However, when databases surge into the multi-terabyte range restoring from logical backups is inefficient. It can take a significant amount of time to insert a hundred million plus rows to a single table, even with very fast I/O. Programs like MySQL Enterprise Backup and Percona XtraBackup allow non-blocking binary copies of your InnoDB tables to be taken while it is online and processing requests. XtraBackup also has an export feature that allows InnoDB file per tablespaces to be detached from the shared table space and imported to a completely different MySQL instance.

The necessary steps to export and import InnoDB tables are in the XtraBackup documentation  …