Have you ever wondered what could happen if your MySQL database goes down?

Although it’s evident such a crash will cause downtime – and surely some business impact in terms of revenue – can you do something to reduce this impact?

The simple answer is “yes” by doing regular backups (of course) but are you 100% sure that your current backup strategy will really come through when an outage occurs? And how much precious time will pass (and how much revenue will be lost) before you get your business back online?

I usually think of backups as the step after HA fails. Let’s say we’re in M<>M replication and something occurs that kills the db but the HA can’t save the day. Let’s pretend that the UPS fails and those servers are completely out. You can’t failover; you have to restore data. Backups are a key piece of “Business Continuity.” Also factor in the frequent need to restore data that’s been …

Last night my residential area lost power for about 2 hours, between 2-4 am. This reminded me of something, and there’s analogies to MySQL infrastructure. Power companies have over recent years invested a lot of money in making the supply more reliable. But, it does fail occasionally still.

From my perspective, the question becomes: is it worth the additional investment for the power companies? Those extra few decimal points in reliability come at a very high cost, and still things can go wrong. So a household (or business) that relies on continuity has to put other measures in place anyway. If the power company has an obligation to deliver to certain standards, it might be more economical for them to provide suitable equipment (UPS, small generator) to these households and business (for free!) and the resulting setup would provide actual continuity rather than merely higher reliability with occasional failures. Everybody …