How to use mysqldump to backup a live MySQL database without locking the tables
Backing up MySQL isn't hard—you just run mysqldump and output to a file —but it's also not really designed for a production environment.
At first, running mysqldumptook only a few seconds so everything being locked wasn't a big deal, but over time our backups grew so large that if we ran a backup the whole site would be down for half an hour. Even with lots of caching this always meant someone would get an error page every day. The problem was that mysqldumplocked the database tables before exporting so no new content would be inserted during the export.
The solution is to use --single-transactionthe -lte parameter, which will give us a consistent backup without locking everything. What actually happens is that mysqldump will start a new SQL transaction, flush all pending writes, and then complete the backup as part of the transaction, which does not prevent other updates from occurring.
Note: The only thing to note is that your database tables should use
InnoDBinstead ofMyISAM. Since this has been the default for some time, we should be fine.
So now that we have that figured out, it's just a matter of adding the parameter to your normal backup routine like this:
$ mysqldump -uUser -pPass -hHost --single-transaction database > backup.bak
Now our backups will be more reliable.
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