XtraBackup Manager - A couple of little features...

Just a quick check in… I just added a couple of things that I have found necessary as I'm testing out XtraBackup Manager.

You can now configure globally whether or not to automatically cleanup failed backups. Previously, XBM would always cleanup after itself on a failure.

I am finding that when things fail, that I would like a chance to investigate and troubleshoot why and perhaps open an XtraBackup bug or try some experimentation to see what might get around the problem.

I have been finding it particularly frustrating when waiting 9 hours for a multi-terabyte system to backup and then have some failure occur right at the end -- with the previous auto-cleanup I was left with nothing to troubleshoot with! Now I can turn off the cleanup and have a chance to do some forensics myself.

At the moment this is a quick and dirty feature -- it is only configurable at the global level, not per backup host.

The option is cleanup_on_failure and is found in /includes/config.php

The other feature that I added was the ability to configure how much memory XtraBackup Manager will tell XtraBackup to use when applying logs or merging incremental snapshots onto a full backup.

The default being used so far is 1G - so be careful about how much memory you have and consider how many possible concurrent backups you have configured.

This option is xtrabackup_use_memory and is also found in the config.php file as well as being a global feature only, not configurable per host.

These are not big features by any means, but they are certainly helpful for me and hopefully for others in the future.

That's it for today!

Lachlan

XtraBackup Manager - Movement on the home front...

It has been a while since I have posted any updates on the XtraBackup Manager front and I apologise for that. Between taking some time off for vacation (how dare I!?) and various different tasks at work snagging my focus away from XBM, I really haven't had much time to work on it.

(Un)fortunately last week we encountered a DB failure that would have been much faster and less painful to recover from had we had XtraBackup Manager finished and in place. While it was a pretty rough week for us DBAs working on addressing the failure, the silver lining is that we now have a concrete example to point to for the importance of the XtraBackup Manager project.

The silver lining in the long story cut short is that I now have the support I need to focus most of my time on XBM again.

So what have I been working on?

I have added support for materialzed backups to the "Continuous Incremental" backup strategy.

I have proceeded with actually running XBM against a few sample hosts with various schedules/settings to see what issues I may encounter.

I have posted a rough design outline in the Google Code wiki for the command-line interface for configuration and started on coding it.

My plan is to follow a similar design to the way the "zfs" command works on (Open)Solaris/Nexenta. 

You can see the design doc here:

http://code.google.com/p/xtrabackup-manager/wiki/DesignDoc

Once the CLI configurator is done, I'll proceed with some heavy documentation. After that point XBM should be pretty much ready for mass consumption in an evaluation capacity.

I have learned a lot about PHP and OO in the process of developing XBM, which has been fun, but I know code wise it isn't as elegant as it could be.

As I said when I started the project, I am not really a developer, so the internals of XBM probably aren't the cleanest code ever, but I'm doing my best while focussing on actually forging ahead to get it functional rather than getting too bogged down in how well the internals adhere to best OO design practise.

I'm hoping to get some more folks trying it out once the configurator and docs are up to snuff.

Stay tuned!

Lachlan