Tag: Docker

Using Docker to Create Pop-Up MySQL Instances

Pop-Up shops are those short lived stores at malls and other places, often times they are kiosks. They serve to satisfy temporal demands like nano quadcopters or engraved keychains. In this context you can create MySQL instances that are short lived, easily provisioned, and easily disposed of.

Imagine you are a developer, or the DBA who has to tell a developer when their code breaks, and you would like an easy way to validate code against the production schema, but not impact your production systems?

This recipe makes some assumptions:

  • You have a MySQL slave or a secondary Innodb Cluster instance to CLONE from
  • You are using MySQL 8.0.17 or later
  • You don’t have hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes of data

If you have a lot of data in your production environment, this won’t be a viable solution, but if your data is in the 10s of gigabytes, this could work for you.

I’m going to present 2 options: 1) A completely standalone transient instance of MySQL 2) A semi-persistent instance of MySQL that can live on an external encrypted SSD or other secured storage.

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MySQL 8 Network Backup Using Docker and CLONE

One of the shortcomings of MySQL GPL is that it does not come with a first party online backup solution. With the release of MySQL 8.0.17 the CLONE plugin was introduced, this essentially integrated online backup as a plugin to the MySQL Server.

The MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual describes how to use the CLONE plugin to perform local clones (backups) here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/clone-plugin-local.html

Doing local clones is incredibly useful and a really fast way of making an image backup. I would argue that the CLONE plugin is better for local image backups than competing solutions simply because the syntax is more brief and efforts were made to integrate CLONE into the server, thereby reducing the impact of performing CLONE operations.

The CLONE plugin can either clone to the server’s default data directory or to another directory specified in the CLONE command. I will demonstrate the latter usage for making online remote backups without modifying the data directory of the container.

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