Like a lot of people, we’re going through MySQL 8 upgrades and finding the sorts of things that change from major version to major version. One of these things that changed behavior in MySQL 8 is in Xtrabackup. Specifically, and for time immemorial, we have used the --safe-slave-backup in Xtrabackup1. We take Xtrabackups from our replicas, so it sounds like a setting everyone can agree with, right? TL;DR If you use Xtrabackup with --safe-slave-backup on a MySQL 8 replica, it will stop replication for the entire backup when it did not do so on 5.

As probably with anyone experimenting with Innodb Cluster and MySQL 8, I’ve spent a good deal of time with MySQL Shell. I think for some old-timers MySQL Shell can initially come across as odd or difficult to understand. Partially, I think it is because Shell offers a deluge of new features from: managing local sandbox mysql instances 3 different shell languages (SQL, Javascript, and Python), full management APIs for Innodb Cluster, parallel logical backup and restore utilities and probably a whole lot more I haven’t found yet.

As part of an overwhelming stampede to migrate to the cloud, we are looking at using AWS RDS Aurora MySQL as a platform for some of our database clusters. Lots of people have lots of opinions about Aurora, some of them are probably justified and some probably not. I was interested in testing the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of Aurora. To be specific, I am testing Aurora v2 (though I expect v3 to work the same).

After a long haiatus, I am back in the world of MySQL and infrastructure. I spent over 10 years at Percona, first as a MySQL Consultant, then as a manager, then as an IT doer of things, finally as the Director of IT. Earlier this year I made the decision to return to an individual contributor role at a new (to me) company, Block, or more specifically, Square. What I’m doing now No doubt some old-timers will remember my blogs at Percona, mostly about PXC and Galera.