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Category: Backups

MySQL Database Backups with mydumper

Published 2022-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis continues a series on MySQL backup options:

There are many tools we can use to back up our MySQL databases. Some are well-known and used by the best technology companies out there (mysqldump comes to mind), and some are a little less famous, but still have their place in the MySQL world. Enter mydumper – the tool is built by the engineering team over at Percona and it‘s supposedly created to address performance issues caused by mysqldump.

Read on to see what it is and how it works.

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Backup Options for MySQL

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis continues a series on backing up MySQL. Part 2 involves Percona XtraBackup:

As already stated above, Percona XtraBackup is one of the primary offerings for MySQL & Percona database administrators developed by Percona. The tool is an open-source backup utility that does not lock our databases during the backup processes it performs. Percona says that their tool can provide automatic verification of backups that have been taken, offer fast dumping and restore times, and above all, it’s supported by their award-winning consulting services helping us make sure that our data and its backups are in safe hands by day and by night.

Part 3 covers mysqlpump:

mysqlpump is a backup utility that is used via the command-line interface. The tool is very similar to mysqldump in that it provides us with the ability to take logical backups, but also different at the same time – the goal of mysqlpump is to be an extendable, parallel-supporting replacement of mysqldump. In their blog from 2015, MySQL team said that one of the primary aims of introducing mysqlpump was not be forced to implement legacy functionality that is provided by mysqldump.

Read on to see how both of these work.

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Continuous Backup for Cosmos DB

Published 2022-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Manvendra Singh wants a backup:

This article will explore Continuous backup and steps to configure it for a new Azure Cosmos DB account or an existing Cosmos DB account. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed and highly secure, NoSQL database service on the Azure cloud that is designed for modern-day application development. It automatically runs backup for its databases on separate Azure blob storage at regular intervals without affecting the performance, availability, and provisioned resource units (RUs) to ensure data protection from a data recovery standpoint which can be needed in case of data corruption, deletion, or wrongly data updates.

Click through for the process and some limitations.

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Monitoring Azure SQL DB Restore Progress

Published 2022-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Sudhir Raparia doesn’t have time to wait:

Database Backup & Restore capabilities are crucial for ensuring Business continuity and Disaster recovery. Restore database operation is usually done in critical situations like hardware failure, application errors, ransomware attacks, accidental deletion of database etc., to restore a production database to latest known stable state. In such critical situations users would want to track the progress of restore operation accurately so that they can plan for subsequent actions and/or alternatives.

Currently in Azure SQL DB, you can view the database restore progress either using Portal or using T-SQL as follows:

Click through for information on that DMV, as well as a recent change to it in Azure SQL DB (though not yet Azure SQL Managed Instance).

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Moving Away from pg_dump

Published 2022-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Pat Wright explains why pg_dump isn’t the best solution for backup and restore:

I’m still fairly new to Postgres having only started about 5 years ago. I started with Pg9.6 and we quickly moved that environment to pg10.   When I arrived at this company,  pg_dump was the only backup we were using.  The DB at that time was still around 50GB, it was reasonable to do the backups in a timeframe that worked for us.  A dump was done every night and stored off to another server.   After some time we started to test Pg_basebackup. This allowed us to full server backup each night. It was a huge improvement as far as speed and ability to handle much larger data sizes. 

Read on for the tradeoffs around tools and various thoughts from Pat.

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The Importance of Validating Postgres Backups

Published 2022-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey brings an important insight:

I’m very much just beginning my journey of learning PostgreSQL. I’ve been documenting that learning over here at Simple-Talk (more on the way there), including backups. For this post, I’m not going to tell you about my “experience” maintaining a PostgreSQL backup routine because, well, there isn’t any. Instead, I have something else to say about backups that I learned, the hard way I might add, while working in SQL Server, that is 100% applicable to PostgreSQL.

Click through for Grant’s thoughts. The “what” makes sense. The “how” is the important part.

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Thoughts on Postgres Backups

Published 2022-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz shares some thoughts on backups in Postgres:

To be honest, I feel pretty unqualified to talk much about backups in Postgres, partially because it’s been a couple of years since I’ve had to manage the uptime of an application. As PostgreSQL has grown in popularity and usage, there is a lot of effort being put into tools like pgBackrest, pgBarman, and some newer solutions like pgcopydb (ok, I realize this isn’t billed as a “backup” tool, but…).

What I can share are a couple of things I’ve learned about restoring clusters and databases, particularly given the extensible nature of Postgres and the variety of tooling.

Read on for thoughts on a variety of topics.

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Backups and Restores when a NAS Requires a Password

Published 2022-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan needs to give the daily password:

Sometimes, you have a share (like Azure Data Box via SMB as was the case for me) that you can access only with a UserName and Password. This is fine as long as you are accessing it interactively by typing it in, but how about accessing it from SQL Server for the purposes of backing up and restoring?

This is where “NET USE” command comes in handy becomes necessary

Read on to see how that can help you out.

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