[GRLUG] On the subject of version control, considering backups

[Ed Howland]

This [1] might be of some help. It runs under Windows, though, and is
not open source. But it might be a starting point.

It sounds like you are trying to get whichever SCM (svn, git, cvs etc)
to diff the insert statements for you between successive mysqldump
outputs. The little bit of research I did on this echoed your lament
about it using too much disk space. My theory is that the order of
records changes too much for any kind of reasonably sized difference
for the SCM to store.

I'm assuming you have already stored your DDL stuff there, structure
changes, views, sprocs etc. And you now care about versioning the
actual data. Your goal being, I presume, to retrieve a copy of the
database rebuilt from a set of deltas in a VCS at a given point in
time. For disaster recovery after something caused corruption or
incorrect contents.

I had the same thought at an earlier job. But most DBA's seem to
prefer just using straight backups (daily, wekely, monthly rotations)
or using logging. [2] The latter being useful to bring a database back
up to the present, once restored from a backup.

What are your specific requirements for database backups?
.

Cheers,
Ed

[1] http://www.mysqldiff.org/
[2] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/binary-log.html

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> For a while, I was backing Rosetta Code's database up to a git repo.
> (With mysqldump options set up such that there would be one insert per
> record per line)  I saw this as a way for finer-grained backups. It
> worked rather nicely, for a bit.
>
> The problem I ran into, though was that the git repo grew *fast*.
> After only a few weeks worth of runs, I believe the repo was twice the
> size of a raw dump, which was itself on the order of 700-800MB. I
> wouldn't be able to keep up that pace; Disk isn't *that* cheap.
>
> Does anyone else have any thoughts on possible practical abuses of SCV
> systems for database and systems backups?
>
> --
> :wq
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-- 
Ed Howland
http://greenprogrammer.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/ed_howland