Announcing MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.7.0

The MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) Team is pleased to announce the release of MEB 3.7.0, with several exciting and advanced features to benefit a wide audience. Included in this release are,

• Redo Log only Incremental Backup
• Incremental Backup without specifying LSN
• Validation of Backup Image using checksums
• Hot Backup of InnoDB .frm files
• Performance Improvements and
• Enhancements for Third-Party Media Managers 

 The gist and usefulness of all these new features are described in short below,

Redo Log Only Incremental Backup:
This is a new type of incremental backup that copies only the InnoDB redo log accumulated since the previous full or incremental backup. The original incremental backup technique copies from the InnoDB data files only those pages that were modified since the previous backup. This incremental backup technique based on the redo log is much faster in most cases than incremental backups that read the data files, if incremental backups are taken frequently. You can choose this new method by specifying the --incremental-with-redo-log-only option on the mysqlbackup command line.

Incremental Backup without specifying LSN:
The new option --incremental-base=dir:/  helps you to perform incremental backup without needing to specify lsn value. The input to --incremental-base=dir:/ option is location of any previous backup over which incremental backup is to be done.

Performance Improvements:
Performance of backup-related I/O operations is improved, particularly on Windows, by reusing I/O library code and best practices from the MySQL Server product. To avoid memory fragmentation and overhead from frequent malloc() / free() sequences, the mysqlbackup command now does all read, compress, uncompress, and comparison operations within a fixed-size buffer that remains allocated while the command runs.

Validation of Backup Image using Checksums:
The new validate option of the mysqlbackup command tests the individual files within a single-file backup using a checksum mechanism. Validation helps to verify the integrity of the single-file backup image as the image file is moved between servers and thereby ensure that backups are reliable and consistent.

Hot Backup of InnoDB .frm files:
With this new feature, you do not have to manually copy the .frm files to perform restore. The new option --only-innodb-with-frm performs an InnoDB-only backup and backs up even the .frm files of InnoDB tables in non locking mode. Formerly, the InnoDB-only backup required putting the database briefly into a read-only state and copying the .frm files within your own backup script.

Enhancements to Third-Party Media Managers:
 To customize the interactions between MySQL Enterprise Backup and media management software (MMS), the --sbt-environment option lets you pass application-specific environment settings to the MMS (for example, Oracle Secure Backup). Each vendor that uses the SBT programming interface could implement its own set of environment variables. The --sbt-environment variable lets you pass environment variable values from any invocation method (for example, a Makefile) rather than setting and unsetting the variables within a wrapper shell script.

For more information about MEB features and examples, please see the MEB documentation located <http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-enterprise-backup/3.7/en/index.html>. My sincere thanks to Lars Thalmann, Sanjay Manwani and all the MEB team members, who have provided valuable features and improvements for every release.

Download the MEB 3.7.0 package from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud web site <https://edelivery.oracle.com/>. MySQL Enterprise customers can begin deploying MEB 3.7.0 immediately. Users without a MySQL Enterprise license can evaluate MEB 3.7.0 for free for 30 days; please try it out and send your feedback to mysql-backup_ww@oracle.com.