[lug] mysqldump versus snapshot versus..

[Nate Duehr]

steve at badcheese.com wrote:
> The only thing tricky about doing DB backups is getting a good, solid 
> snapshot of the DB.  This generally means 'locking' the tables as you 
> dump them.

Or... get a real commercial DB with a "quiescent" mode specifically 
designed for the purpose where the DB tables are stopped and changes are 
written to logical logs while the snapshot is being taken.

Just a thought.

The pains that people go through to use MySQL amaze me sometimes... 
commercial DB's dealt with all of this "backup/recovery stuff" a decade 
ago.

Oracle, Informix, others all have tools that have been around long 
enough to have most of the bugs/problems worked out of them and large 
user-bases and support structures... similar to LUG's...

Whereas you are still having to "roll your own" with MySQL, many of the 
commercial alternatives will have out-of-the box automation for backups, 
etc... you just configure it.

MySQL has its place, but once you start really using an RDBMS in a 
production environment, PostgreSQL seems "better" to me if you must 
stick with an open-source RDBMS, or really I think a commercial engine 
starts to show some real administration abilities that MySQL and 
PostgreSQL lack.

I also believe that since MySQL is owned by Oracle, they'd like to keep 
MySQL "dumb and stupid" in that way... but that's just my own personal 
paranoia/thought.

Hmm, IBM used to offer various Informix engines for free for 
personal/non-profit use, but I can't find the link on their website 
now... perhaps they've gotten "proud" of Informix again...

Well anyway, here's their different versions:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/ids-ed-choice/

When I clicked on pricing for the low-end one, it was just over $100... 
not bad, considering what you get... I think.  This split they did of 
the versions isn't something I've had to deal with yet.

And they've supported Linux for a long time... of course, since there's 
lots of folks running this stuff on IBM blade servers that are running 
virtualized Linux... or so I hear.

Nate