Notes on Moving Large Databases

NOTES

• by default, when you do a mysqldump, it locks the tables. You can change that by passing --lock-tables=false as a parameter.
• take differential backups every day and full backups every week.
• don't have to sit and look at the Terminal screen and wait and wait.. Write a script, run it wth cron
• 36.56 GB database took 21 minues to backup, without any gzip compression.. You can use the time command to find out how long it took. The backup file was 21GB in size.
• 20.62 GB database took 12 minutes to backup, without any compression. Resulting file was 11 GB in size
• use rsync instead of scp. scp gets stalled. rsync copies faster. use the -P flag to see progress and the ability to pause/resume file transfers
• the server where these tests were done had the following specs: 2GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 160GB HDD, 10MBps network link

Exporting

mysqldump --user=XXX --password=XXX --single-transaction --routines --triggers --quick --all-databases > XXX.sql

• --single-transaction only works with InnoDB, let's you backup data without blocking any applications. The --single-transaction option and the --lock-tables option are mutually exclusive
• --routines copies stored procedures and functions
• --triggers Include triggers for each dumped table. A trigger is a named database object that is associated with a table, and that activates when a particular event occurs for the table. Some uses for triggers are to perform checks of values to be inserted into a table or to perform calculations on values involved in an update.
• --quick forces mysqldump to retrieve rows for a table from the server a row at a time rather than retrieving the entire row set and buffering it in memory before writing it out.
• To dump large tables, combine the --single-transaction option with the --quick option
• To include stored routines and events in a dump made using --all-databases, use the --routines and --events options explicitly.
• The performance_schema database, is not dumped even with the --all-databases option. You can mention it explicitly with the --databases option.
• By default, it'll lock tables when you dump, so be careful of using either --single-transaction or --skip-lock-tables option when moving live databases.

Get only stored procedures and table structure, but no data

Use the --no-data (or -d) flag to not dump table data. It'll only dump the CREATE TABLE statement for the table (for example, to create an empty copy of the table by loading the dump file)

mysqldump --user=XXX --password=XXX --no-data --routines --events XXX > dump-defs.sql

Sizes

Creating the backups

# 36.56 GB input > 21 GB output file
time mysqldump -uroot -p --databases foo > bak_foo.sql
Enter password:

real    21m3.347s
user    5m21.110s
sys     1m26.830s

# 20.62 GB input > 11 GB output file
time mysqldump -uroot -p bar > bak_bar.sql
Enter password:

real    12m40.238s
user    2m36.310s
sys     0m37.380s

Compressng the backups

• Using gzip compresses the original file. Meaning it won't say the compressed backup .sql.gz as a separate file and you lose the original .sql file.

# 11 GB input file >  2.4 GB
time gzip -9 bak_bar.sql

real    20m30.855s
user    17m8.170s
sys     0m14.760s

• Compressing a 36GB .sql file resulted in a 4GB .sql.gz file

Uncompressing the backups

• 2.4 GB took 2.4 minutes to extract. (An average of 1 GB per minute).
• Uncompressing the backup gets rid of the original .sql.gz file.

time gunzip bar.sql.gz

real    2m4.765s
user    1m22.872s
sys     0m12.850s

Importing the backups

The database you import should already exist. When using --databases, CREATE DATABASE and USE statements are included in the output before each new database.

CREATE DATABASE foo;

# uncompressed .sql file
mysql -uroot -p DBNAME < BAKFILE.sql

# compressed .sql.gz file
pv mydump.sql.gz | gunzip | mysql -u root -p

pv lets you monitor the progress of data through a pipe, meaning you'll see a progress bar!

-- Open the console and start the interactive MySQL mode
USE <name_of_your_database>;
SOURCE <path_of_your_.sql>;

Moving /var/lib/mysql

Another way of moving the databases (plus users and permissions), is to sync the entire MySQL data directory (default is /var/lib/mysql defined in /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf) to the new server.

You can also find out what directory it is with

SELECT @@datadir;

rsync -vPhaze "ssh -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa -p ${REMOTE_PORT}" ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:/var/lib/mysql/ /var/lib/mysql/ &>> ${LOGFILE}

Here's a [bash script][1] for achieving this that also logs the progress. Run this script via Cron so that you don't end up being stuck sitting in front of a Terminal

crontab -e

Links

• What Are Full, Incremental, and Differential Backups?
• MySQL Docs: mysqldump
• StackExchange: Safest way to perform mysqldump on a live system with active reads and writes?