22 May

An elaborate way to break a MySQL server with XtraBackup

XtraBackup is a great piece of software from Percona, which allows creating (nearly) lock-less MySQL/InnoDB backups. The tool has been around for quite some time and recently even received a major version bump. I have relied on it many times over the years. As it turns out, using it in some configurations may lead to heavy swapping or prevent MySQL from running queries.

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21 Apr

Improved script for extracting table from MySQL text dump

A few days ago I showed a quick way to extract one table form a mysqldump output. Here is a more complete version which supports extracting either a full schema or a table from the specified schema. If full schema is being extracted, the script also looks for any associated views and routines.

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19 Apr

Extracting one table from mysqldump or phpMyAdmin backup

Using mysqldump is a quick way to do backups, although usually limited to only smaller databases - perhaps up to a few gigabytes large. It is still a fairly popular solution as majority of databases aren't even that big. Also phpMyAdmin provides a variant of mysqldump format through its Export function. Everything works well for plain dump and restore, but in certain situations it is necessary to restore only a single table. With all data being in a single text file, it may not be a trivial task. Here is how I deal with the problem.

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