Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.3.8 on April 18, 2017. Downloads are available from our download site or Percona Software Repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona XtraBackup drives down backup costs while providing unique features for MySQL backups.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.3 series.

New Features

• Percona XtraBackup now uses hardware accelerated implementation of crc32 where it is supported.
• Percona XtraBackup has implemented new options: --tables-exclude and --databases-exclude that work similar to --tables and --databases options, but exclude given names/paths from backup.
• The xbstream binary now supports parallel extraction with the --parallel option.
• The xbstream binary now supports following new options: --decrypt, --encrypt-threads, --encrypt-key, and --encrypt-key-file. When --decrypt option is specified xbstream will automatically decrypt encrypted files when extracting input stream. Either --encrypt-key or --encrypt-key-file options must be specified to provide encryption key, but not both. Option --encrypt-threads specifies the number of worker threads doing the encryption, default is 1.

Bugs Fixed:

• xtrabackup would not create fresh InnoDB redo logs when preparing incremental backup. Bug fixed #1669592.
• xtrabackup --export can now export tables that have more than 31 index. Bug fixed #1089681.
• Unrecognized character x01; marked by message could be seen if backups were taken with the version check enabled. Bug fixed #1651978.

Release notes with all the bugfixes for Percona XtraBackup 2.3.8 are available in our online documentation. Bugs can be reported on the launchpad bug tracker.

Percona announces the GA release of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.6 on February 22, 2017. You can download it from our download site and apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona XtraBackup drives down backup costs while providing unique features for MySQL backups.

New features:

• Percona XtraBackup implemented a new --remove-original option that can be used to remove the encrypted and compressed files once they’ve been decrypted/decompressed.

Bugs Fixed:

• XtraBackup was using username set for the server in a configuration file even if a different user was defined in the user’s configuration file. Bug fixed #1551706.
• Incremental backups did not include xtrabackup_binlog_info and xtrabackup_galera_info files. Bug fixed #1643803.
• In case a warning was written to stout instead of stderr during the streaming backup, it could cause assertion in the xbstream. Bug fixed #1647340.
• xtrabackup --move-back option did not always restore out-of-datadir tablespaces to their original directories. Bug fixed #1648322.
• innobackupex and xtrabackup scripts were showing the password in the ps output when it was passed as a command line argument. Bug fixed #907280.
• Incremental backup would fail with a path like ~/backup/inc_1 because xtrabackup didn’t properly expand tilde. Bug fixed #1642826.
• Fixed missing dependency check for Perl Digest::MD5 in rpm packages. This will now require perl-MD5 package to be installed from EPEL repositories on CentOS 5 and CentOS 6 (along with libev). Bug fixed #1644018.
• Percona XtraBackup now supports -H, -h, -u and -p shortcuts for --hostname, --datadir, --user and --password respectively. Bugs fixed #1655438 and #1652044.

Release notes with all the bugfixes for Percona XtraBackup 2.4.6 are available in our online documentation. Please report any bugs to the launchpad bug tracker.

With the last Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) release, two major features were added:

* a new command to bootstrap the cluster was added to the init script
* SST via Xtrabackup now supports Xtrabackup 2.1 features

In this post, I want to explain the benefits of these added features and how to use them.

If you follow the mysqlperformanceblog regularly, you’ve already noticed that there are several ways to start a node and that it’s not always easy to start the node that is supposed to bootstrap the entire cluster.

See :
– http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/01/29/how-to-start-a-percona-xtradb-cluster/
– http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtradb-cluster/manual/bootstrap.html
– http://www.lefred.be/node/167
– new undocumented option –wsrep-new-cluster

With the new option, bootstrap-pxc, there is no need to modify my.cnf or add parameters (when supported) to the init script. Now you can simply bootstrap (start the first node that will initiate the cluster) using one of these commands :

/etc/init.d/mysql bootstrap-pxc

or

service mysql bootstrap-pxc

Much easier, isn’t it ?

Now the second added feature is the support of xbstream from Xtrabackup 2.1.

This is useful as it will help to speed up SST operations as the backup could be performed in parallel, compressed and compacted (without copying the secondary indexes).

To configure this, you just need to add two sections to my.cnf: [sst] and [xtrabackup] like this:

[sst]
   streamfmt=xbstream
   [xtrabackup]
   compress
   compact
   parallel=2
   compress-threads=2
   rebuild-threads=2

Some example to compare the effect of these parameters.

We have one database with 4 InnoDB tables of 480M, and we test Xtrabackup SST with the following settings:

Blue:Xtrabackup with tar (default)
Red: Xtrabackup with xbstream and 2 threads (like the configuration above)
Yellow: Xtrabackup with xbstream and 4 threads

This quick benchmark was realized on a small dataset with tables not having secondary indexes (no benefits from compact). I will prepare a more detailed benchmark for a future blog post.

But we can see that the new settings helps to “free” the donor faster, but the process on the joiner takes more time.
So it depends on what are your constraints to choose the best options that fit your workload’s requirements.

Remember: to be able to use Xtrabackup as SST you need to add in my.cnf:
wsrep_sst_method=xtrabackup
wsrep_sst_auth=user:password

Important: to be able to use xbstream with compression, you need to have qpress installed on the system and in the mysql user’s path (like /usr/bin for example).

Also the MySQL datadir must be empty before starting the SST process (see lp:1193240)

If you want to get familiar with these new options, I’ve updated my puppet recipes available on github.

Note:
For rebuild-threads, the default is $(grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo) and for qpress, the decompression is also done in parallel (with number of qpress instances == $(grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo)).

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