Nimesa supports application-consistent backup of MSSQL databases with the recovery options from instance to table level. Recently we launched the MySQL application consistent backup to the beta customers
Application consistency or transaction consistent backups of the Microsoft centric applications like ADDS ( Active Directory), MSSQL and MS Exchange are possible with the use of Microsoft’s Volume Shadow copy Services aka VSS. Most of the Storage provider build VSS- Hardware Provider to directly take a LUN snapshot of the array after the data flush.
During the backup ( the point the snapshot is created ) backup vendors are able to interface with VSS Provider using the VSS Requestor to place the Microsoft applications in a temporary consistent state.
You can read more about the types of backup in my earlier posts
MySQL database is not VSS aware which means there is no VSS Writer for the MySQL, and MySQL usually deploy in a non-Microsoft operating system like Linux so different approach has to be taken to create an application-consistent backup of MySQL databases.
Hot Backup of MySQL using Database freezing
In this approach, MySQL tables will be flushed to disk and the tables will be put in a read-lock mode which is only reads are allowed, no writes can happen during that time and the lock will be released as soon as the snapshot is created ( which can be achieved in seconds )
There are other ways to create backup MySQL dump or cold backup which is not recommendable to achieve a greater RPO and RTO. Read more here
In MySQL community edition: With the MySQL dump, the recovery time will be huge and the backup will be always full.
In case of cold backup, the database will be unavailable for a longer time than the read lock approach.
Nimesa chose the optimal way to back up the MySQL database with the application/transaction consistency.
The advantages of this approach are
- The database will be available online ( Read-only mode) during the backup
- No extra storage is required for this approach
- This approach gives you a better RTO comparing the other backup approaches
Also published on Medium.
