1) Offload some of the queries from one server to another and spread the load: One of the biggest advantages to have master-slave set up in MySQL is to be able to use master for all of the inserts and send some, if not all, select queries to slave. This will most probably speed up your application without having to diving into optimizing all the queries or buying more hardware.

2) Do backups from slave: One of the advantages people overlook is that you can use MySQL slave to do backups from. That way site is not affected at all when doing backups. This becomes a big deal when your database has grown to multiple gigs and every time you do backups using mysqldump, site lags when table locks happen. For some sites, this could mean that site goes down for few secs to minutes. If you have slave, you just take slave out of rotation (should be built into code) and run backups off the slave. You can even stop slave MySQL instance and copy the var folder instead of doing mysqldump.

Ok let us dive into how to setup master-slave replication under MySQL. There are many configuration changes you can do to optimize your MySQL set up. I will just touch on very basic ones to get the replication to work. Here are some assumptions:

Master server ip: 10.0.0.1
Slave server ip: 10.0.0.2
Slave username: slaveuser
Slave pw: slavepw
Your data directory is: /usr/local/mysql/var/

Put the following in your master my.cnf file under [mysqld] section:

# changes made to do master
server-id = 1
relay-log = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-bin
relay-log-index = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-bin.index
log-error = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql.err
master-info-file = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-master.info
relay-log-info-file = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-log.info
datadir = /usr/local/mysql/var
log-bin = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-bin
# end master

Copy the following to slave’s my.cnf under [mysqld] section:

# changes made to do slave
server-id = 2
relay-log = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-bin
relay-log-index = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-bin.index
log-error = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql.err
master-info-file = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-master.info
relay-log-info-file = /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql-relay-log.info
datadir = /usr/local/mysql/var
# end slave setup

Create user on master:
mysql> grant replication slave on *.* to slaveuser@'10.0.0.2' identified by 'slavepw';

Do a dump of data to move to slave
mysqldump -u root --all-databases --single-transaction --master-data=1 > masterdump.sql

import dump on slave
mysql < masterdump.sql

After dump is imported go in to mysql client by typing mysql. Let us tell the slave which master to connect to and what login/password to use:
mysql> CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='10.0.0.1', MASTER_USER='slaveuser', MASTER_PASSWORD='slavepw';

Let us start the slave:
mysql> start slave;

You can check the status of the slave by typing
mysql> show slave status\G

The last row tells you how many seconds its behind the master. Don’t worry if it doesn’t say 0, the number should be going down over time until it catches up with master (at that time it will show Seconds_Behind_Master: 0) If it shows NULL, it could be that slave is not started (you can start by typing: start slave) or it could be that it ran into an error (shows up in Last_errno: and Last_error under show slave status\G).

Related posts:

• How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files?
• How do I import individual table dump files in to MySQL using shell script?
• MySQL backups using mysqldump

————————————-
DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

mysqldump database_name table1 > table1.sql
mysqldump database_name table2 > table2.sql

This could be very painful if you have 10’s or 100’s of tables. Until today, I never ran into a situation where I had to deal with dumping more than few tables at a time. Today I had to do a dump of 181 tables. I was not going to sit there and type in that command with 181 table names. It is not just time consuming but it is also stupid. So I wrote this script to help me with this task. We still use mysqldump command as described above, except we do it programmatically to make it easier on us:

#!/bin/bash
db=$1
if [ "$db" = "" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 db_name"
exit 1
fi
mkdir $$
cd $$
clear
for table in `mysql $db -e 'show tables' | egrep -v 'Tables_in_' `; do
echo "Dumping $table"
mysqldump --opt -Q $db $table > $table.sql
done
if [ "$table" = "" ]; then
echo "No tables found in db: $db"
fi

You can also compress your files by adding bzip2, zip or any other compression commands after mysqldump command. Here is the same script with bzip2 command added:
#!/bin/bash
db=$1
if [ "$db" = "" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 db_name"
exit 1
fi
mkdir $$
cd $$
clear
for table in `mysql $db -e 'show tables' | egrep -v 'Tables_in_' `; do
echo "Dumping $table"
mysqldump --opt -Q $db $table > $table.sql
bzip2 $table.sql
done
if [ "$table" = "" ]; then
echo "No tables found in db: $db"
fi

I do not recommend doing compression on a production server since most compression program put descent amount of load on the server. Also note that this will delay your dump considerably. You may also want to use different parameters for running mysqldump. Type man mysqldump in your shell to read more.

Related posts:

• MySQL database backup file compress gzip vs bzip2
• MySQL backups using mysqldump

————————————-
DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

070815 15:31:46 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 9433957,
InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498.
InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the
InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the
InnoDB: largest such row.

I poked around and found out our log files were set to default (5 mb) and they needed to be increased. After doing some calculations and research, I decided going to 50 mb at this point would be a good way to go. So I made the change in my.cnf file and added: innodb_log_file_size = 50M

I then stopped our mysql server and restarted it. And to my horror I saw following error messages show up in the mysql error logs:

070815 17:37:40 [ERROR] /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld: Incorrect information in file: './dbname/table_name.frm'
070815 17:37:40 [ERROR] /usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld: Incorrect information in file: './dbname/table_name.frm'

I stopped the mysql server right away. I then remember, by help of a friend, that I have to remove the old log files if I change the size by changing innodb_log_file_size. So I issued a command: mv ib_logfile? ..

This command moves both ib_logfile1 and ib_logfile2 down one directory. I didn’t want to just remove ‘em so instead I moved them. After that, I restarted mysql again and to my comfort, everything came back up without errors. So lesson learned: if you change ib_logfile size by using innodb_log_file_size setting, make sure you move existing log files before you start mysql again.

————————————-
DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Created by: Sunny Walia
# Date created: 5/24/03
# Date Modified: 5/29/07
# Purpose: do any type of preprocessing before log.php can do its work.
# Also does log rotation and backup.
#
# Modification history:
# 5/25/03: added comments.
# Gzip and move to backup logs folder
# added config info on top
#
#
# configuration info
SERVERNAME="svr1"
WORKINGDIR="/admin/backups/$SERVERNAME/logs/"
BACKUPLOGSDIR="/admin/backups/$SERVERNAME/logs/archived/"
BACKUP_DIR="/admin/backups/$SERVERNAME/"
LOGDIR="/usr/local/apache2/logs/"
DATE=`date +%m%d%y%H`
APACHCTL_LOC="/usr/local/apache2/bin/"
#
mkdir $WORKINGDIR -p
mkdir $BACKUPLOGSDIR -p
mkdir $BACKUP_DIR -p
#
# move the logs into their temp name so apache can continue to write to it
mv ${LOGDIR}access_log ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.old
mv ${LOGDIR}error_log ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.old
#
# restart apache gracefully so it will finish what its doing and start a new log file
# when done serving current requests
${APACHCTL_LOC}apachectl graceful
#
# give some time to apache to finish serving pending requests (in secs)
sleep 15
#
# copy the files to our directory for processing
cp ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.old ${WORKINGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log
cp ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.old ${WORKINGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log
#
mv ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.old ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.$DATE
mv ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.old ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.$DATE
gzip ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.$DATE
gzip ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.$DATE
#
# we move instead of copy than delete since if mv fails, we still have originals
# mv can fail if target location is full
mv ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_access_log.$DATE.gz $BACKUPLOGSDIR
mv ${LOGDIR}${SERVERNAME}_error_log.$DATE.gz $BACKUPLOGSDIR


Let us make the script executable:
chmod +x script_name.sh

You can automate this to happen every day by putting it in your crontab:
crontab -e

1 0 * * * /path/to/this/script

This will rotate your logs at 12:01 AM every day.

————————————-
DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

rsync -ae ssh server1:/home /home/backups/server1_home_backup/

This command will download all the files/directories from /home on server1 and copies them to /home/backups/server1_home_backup/
-a = archive mode. This will preserve permissions, timestamps, etc.
-e = specify which remote shell to use. In our case, we want to use ssh which follow right after “e”

Let us improve on this and add couple more parameters:

rsync -zave ssh --progress server1:/home /home/backups/server1_home_backup/
-z = adds zip compression.
-v = verbose
–progress = my favorite parameter when I am doing rsync manually, not so good when you have it in cron. This show progress (how_many_files_left/how_many_files_total) and speed along with some other useful data.

Great.. we are moving along pretty good. Let us add some security to make sure things work the way we want to.

rsync --delete-after -zave ssh --progress server1:/home /home/backups/server1_home_backup/

–delete-after = this will delete files on backup server which are missing from source after ALL syncing is done. If you don’t care of having extra files on your backup server and have plenty of disk space to spare, do not use this parameter.

Lastly, one of the VERY handy parameters,

rsync --delete-after -zave ssh --progress server1:/home /home/backups/server1_home_backup/ -n

The -n (or –dry-run) parameter is great to use for testing. It will not transfer or delete any files, rather will report to you what it would have done if it was ran with out -n parameter. This way you can test it with out destroying or transfering data just to find out that is not what you wanted.

For further reading: man rsync

After searching for a bit on google about this problem, apparently only way you can do that is by exporting your mysql databases, delete ibdata1 file, import databases. This creates new ibdata file with correct space usage. Atleast there is a way to get around this issue. But honestly, too much pain on production boxes where we might be trying to remove old databases to reclaim some of the hard drive space.

An preventive measure one can use is to use option: innodb_file_per_table (‘put innodb_file_per_table’ in your my.cnf file under [mysqld] section). This will create individual files for tables under database directory. So now when I delete the database, all the space is returned since the directory is now deleted along with database along with all the tables inside the directory. In my test after you put option innodb_file_per_table your my.cnf, you will have to still do export/import to be able to minimize disk usage and have the ability to delete database at your leisure without worrying about reclaiming the disk space. Here are the steps I took. DISCLAIMER: Please make backup of your data and use following steps at your own risk. Doing it on test server is HIGHLY recommended. Please don’t come back and tell me that you lost your data because you followed my steps. They work for me and they may not work for you!

That said, here are the steps:

1. Add innodb_file_per_table in your my.cnf file under [mysqld] section
2. run following commands at the prompt. Your path to binaries might be different.

#note: following assumes you are logged in as root
mkdir -p /temp #temp dir to save our sql dump
#lets make a backup of current database. -p is used if there is pw set
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump -R -q -p --all-databases > /temp/all.sql
#stop mysql so we can remove all the files in the dir
/etc/init.d/mysql stop
rm -fr /usr/local/mysql/var/* #remove all the files
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_install_db #install default dbs
#change ownership so mysql user can read/write to/from files
chown -R mysql.mysql /usr/local/mysql/var/
#start mysql so we can import our dump
/etc/init.d/mysql start
#note there is no -p since defaults don't have mysql pw set
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql < /temp/all.sql
/etc/init.d/mysql restart

This should be all you need to do. At this point when you remove a database, it will delete the directory of the db and all the data contained within which in turn will give you your disk space back.

REMEMBER: Backup your data and be smart about using code found on internet. If you don’t know what you are doing, hire a consultant who does.

I went and did few tests to see if its beneficial for us to use Bzip2 instead of gzip. I could’ve tried 7z also but that is not something installed on most linux machines I work on and I didn’t want use a solution which will require me to add more software. Here are the results:

Original sql file size: 584M
Using gzip: 166M
Time spent on compressing 1 minute 25 secs
Using bzip2: 125M
Time spent on compressing 1 minute 50 secs

As we can see that it takes longer to compress but file size is much smaller (adds up fast for multiple backups). As our database grows bigger and bigger, the size difference will matter quite a bit. Since we also ftp the file off the server to onsite/offsite location hourly as well.

Does anybody know of any backup techniques which we can use for free and we can do incrementals with? comments are always welcome.  To learn more about gzip or bzip2, see man gzip or man bzip2 respectively.

Intially I was doing backup by using: mysqldump dbname > weekdayHour.dbname.sql hourly. This allowed us to have week worth of backups done every hour and auto overwriting old backups. Eventually we added stored procedures and triggers to the mix and all of the sudden this dump wasn’t getting all the stored procedures and triggers. So we started using mysqldump with -R parameter which in man states:

Dump stored routines (functions and procedures) from the dumped databases.

Recently when we started to see more and more traffic, we noticed that our server was under heavy load on the hour. Ofcourse we quickly found it was due to mysqldump running on the hour which was causing the lag. Eventually we had enough traffic on the site where this was causing connection problems with mysql. So I went through man mysqldump again to find solution. And thanks to those smart people in mysqldump dev team, there I found couple more parameters to make this backup process little less painful. At this point we are using: mysqldump -R -q –single-transaction > weekdayHour.dbname.sql This seems to have decreased the load on the server and we haven’t got errors connecting to mysql. Since we use innodb tables in this particular db, we could use single-transaction parameter. Here is what our friendly man mysqldump has to say about these two parameters:

-q …This option is useful for dumping large tables. It 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…

–single-transaction …This option issues a BEGIN SQL statement before dumping data from the server. It is useful only with transactional tables such as InnoDB and BDB, because then it dumps the consistent state of the database at the time when BEGIN was issued without blocking any applications…

If you are thinking about using these two parameters, please spend couple minutes reading through man mysqldump and look at other notes which might pertain to your setup.

One last but very important thing we do after our backups are run is to move the new backup files off the server just in case server dies. I achieved this by using ncftp package which includes ncftpput command line utility. With ncftp, you can store ip/login/pw in a file and tell ncftp to use that for login information. Lets look at the script as a whole:

NOTE: comments in this script is for information purposes only. You can remove them if you like

#!/bin/bash
#
#http://crazytoon.com/2007/01/23/mysql-backups-using-mysqldump/
#
DATE=`date '+%u%H'` # this sets up weekly rotation of backup files
BACKUP_DIR="/admin/backups/domain.com/" # this dir will be created if it doesn't exist
HOST=`hostname` #you may want to hard code this if you hostname returns wrong information
mkdir ${BACKUP_DIR}mysql/ -p
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump -R -q --single-transaction --databases dbname1 dbname2 -ppassword > ${BACKUP_DIR}mysql/$HOST$DATE.sql
rm ${BACKUP_DIR}mysql/$HOST$DATE.sql.gz > /dev/null 2>&1
gzip -9 ${BACKUP_DIR}mysql/$HOST$DATE.sql > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/ncftpput -R -f ${BACKUP_DIR}hostinfo / ${BACKUP_DIR}mysql/$HOST$DATE.sql.gz

This is what your hostinfo file should contain (just make sure you edit it and put your own server ip, username, and password):
host 123.123.123.123
user loginname
pass loginpassword

To read more about mysqldump, see man mysqldump