Large databases, long mysqldump times, long waits for globally locked tables. These problems basically never go away when you rely on mysqldump with –all-databases or a list of databases, as it dumps schemas serially. I’m not going to explain serial vs parallel processing here since that’s a larger topic. Suffice to say that in these days of multi-core / multi-cpu servers we only make use of one processor’s core when we serially export databases using mysqldump. So, I have a new script that attempts to alleviate those issues and now I need testers to provide feedback/improvements.
In order to keep some sanity when dealing with hundreds of database servers, the script takes care of the following:
- low global locking time requirements: solved by parallel tasks / forked processes
- backup file checking: with mysqldump files; it checks for “–Dump completed” at the end of the sql file
- ability to backup all-databases or an array of databases
- if backing up all databases, the ability to skip schema names like information_schema, lost&found, test, etc that can be in the data directory but aren’t really schemas
- compression of sql files
- size reporting of plain text and compressed sql files
- overall time and single export elapsed time reporting for each schema backup
- debug level logging of sub routines for troubleshooting if needed
- file pruning to keep 28 days of backups, so you don’t have to manually remove files to keep the backups partition from filling up
- talkback reporting for Monolith monitoring system / email reporting as well
- logs to /var/log/messages with final report so we get information in network based syslog collection
- process state exit code reporting in the case of various issues like “mysqldump failed because binlog not enabled when using –master-data=x”
So, that all said, if you want to help test this script email me at ” the matt reid at g m a i l . c o m”
It’s a bit over 800 lines of perl so I’m not going to paste it here, therefore email me 
Before mentioning mk-parallel-dump or Maatkit:
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Here’s an email response I just sent out to Andrew Houghton that will address something that people are bringing up:
If mk-parallel-dump did all of the things I needed to do then I’d use it. Since it doesn’t, I wrote this. And, since it’s main purpose is to be part of Monolith (which is what talkback is for) and I don’t want to have to worry about the release cycle of maatkit when I release versions of Monolith then it makes more sense to have this as a wrapper for mysqldump than it does to rely on installing maatkit as a requirement of Monolith and the wrapping that.
Maatkit is a great piece of software, but in this case, not what I wanted.