MySQL Database Service – find the info: part 1 – backups

In this new series of articles we will explore the different sources of information available when using MySQL Database Service on OCI to effectively perform your daily DBA job.

Of course there is way less things to take care of, like backups, upgrades, operating system and hardware maintenance, …

But as a serious DBA, you want to know the status of all this and maintain some control.

Some information is available on OCI’s webconsole and some in Performance_Schema and Sys.

If you use MySQL Shell for Visual Studio Code, you have the possibility to see an overview of your server using the Performance Dashboard:

But today we will take a look at the backup, a very important responsibility of the DBA.

When you use MySQL Database Service on OCI, you can define the backup policy at the DB Instance’s creation. You can always modify it later:

In MDS, the backups are online backups using block volume snapshots. For more information, you can check the online manual.

What is important is to control the backup, see if it succeeded, compare the size and the execution time.

We can see that the recent backup is way smaller than the previous one. Let’s have a look at the details by clicking on it:

We can see that this is an incremental backup, so this is a normal and expected behavior.

In the Metrics section, we have some metrics related to backups that are useful for this purpose:

But don’t forget that as this is a snapshot, even if you reduce the size of you database, the full backup size won’t really shrink:

We can see above that even if we have deleted a lot of data after a backup, the total backup size didn’t shrink.

But of course the next backup is incremental and its size is small:

Alerting

You also have the possibility to create an alert in case your backup didn’t happen, but it will work only if backups are enabled.

You can follow Scott’s article on how to create a new alarm.

This is the overview the created Alarm:

And if we don’t have a backup for one day, we receive an email in our mailbox like the one below:

Conclusion

You can now see when your backups are made, which type of backup they are and their size. You also know how to create an alarm related to your backups.

On the next article we will check the disk space consumption of your MySQL DB system on OCI.