Backup Locks¶

LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP¶

LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP uses a new MDL lock type to block updates to non-transactional tables and DDL statements for all tables. More specifically, if there’s an active LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP lock, all DDL statements and all updates to MyISAM, CSV, MEMORY and ARCHIVE tables will be blocked in the Waiting for backup lock status as visible in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA or PROCESSLIST. SELECT queries for all tables and INSERT/REPLACE/UPDATE/DELETE against InnoDB, Blackhole and Federated tables are not affected by LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP. Blackhole tables obviously have no relevance for backups, and Federated tables are ignored by both logical and physical backup tools.

Unlike FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP does not flush tables, i.e. storage engines are not forced to close tables and tables are not expelled from the table cache. As a result, LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP only waits for conflicting statements to complete (i.e. DDL and updates to non-transactional tables). It never waits for SELECTs, or UPDATEs to InnoDB tables to complete, for example.

If an “unsafe” statement is executed in the same connection that is holding a LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP lock, it fails with the following error:

ERROR 1880 (HY000): Can't execute the query because you have a conflicting backup lock

UNLOCK TABLES releases the lock acquired by LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP.

LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP¶

LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP uses another new MDL lock type to block all operations that might change either binary log position or Exec_Master_Log_Pos or Exec_Gtid_Set (i.e. master binary log coordinates corresponding to the current SQL thread state on a replication slave) as reported by SHOW MASTER/SLAVE STATUS. More specifically, a commit will only be blocked if the binary log is enabled (both globally, and for connection with sql_log_bin), or if commit is performed by a slave thread and would advance Exec_Master_Log_Pos or Executed_Gtid_Set. Connections that are currently blocked on the global binlog lock can be identified by the Waiting for binlog lock status in PROCESSLIST.

LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP flushes the current binary log coordinates to InnoDB. Thus, under active LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP, the binary log coordinates in InnoDB are consistent with its redo log and any non-transactional updates (as the latter are blocked by LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP). It is planned that this change will enable Percona XtraBackup to avoid issuing the more invasive LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP command under some circumstances.

UNLOCK BINLOG¶

UNLOCK BINLOG releases the LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP lock, if acquired by the current connection. The intended use case for Percona XtraBackup is:

LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP
... copy .frm, MyISAM, CSV, etc. ...
LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP
UNLOCK TABLES
... get binlog coordinates ...
... wait for redo log copying to finish ...
UNLOCK BINLOG

Privileges¶

Both LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP and LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP require the RELOAD privilege. The reason for that is to have the same requirements as FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK.

Interaction with other global locks¶

Both LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP and LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP have no effect if the current connection already owns a FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK lock, as it’s a more restrictive lock. If FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK is executed in a connection that has acquired LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP or LOCK BINLOG FOR BACKUP, FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK fails with an error.

If the server is operating in the read-only mode (i.e. read_only set to 1), statements that are unsafe for backups will be either blocked or fail with an error, depending on whether they are executed in the same connection that owns LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP lock, or other connections.

MyISAM index and data buffering¶

MyISAM key buffering is normally write-through, i.e. by the time each update to a MyISAM table is completed, all index updates are written to disk. The only exception is delayed key writing feature which is disabled by default.

When the global system variable delay_key_write is set to ALL, key buffers for all MyISAM tables are not flushed between updates, so a physical backup of those tables may result in broken MyISAM indexes. To prevent this, LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP will fail with an error if delay_key_write is set to ALL. An attempt to set delay_key_write to ALL when there’s an active backup lock will also fail with an error.

Another option to involve delayed key writing is to create MyISAM tables with the DELAY_KEY_WRITE option and set the delay_key_write variable to ON (which is the default). In this case, LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP will not be able to prevent stale index files from appearing in the backup. Users are encouraged to set delay_key_writes to OFF in the configuration file, my.cnf, or repair MyISAM indexes after restoring from a physical backup created with backup locks.

MyISAM may also cache data for bulk inserts, e.g. when executing multi-row INSERTs or LOAD DATA statements. Those caches, however, are flushed between statements, so have no effect on physical backups as long as all statements updating MyISAM tables are blocked.

mysqldump¶

mysqldump has also been extended with a new option, lock-for-backup (disabled by default). When used together with the --single-transaction option, the option makes mysqldump issue LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP before starting the dump operation to prevent unsafe statements that would normally result in an inconsistent backup.

When used without the single-transaction option, lock-for-backup is automatically converted to lock-all-tables.

Option lock-for-backup is mutually exclusive with lock-all-tables, i.e. specifying both on the command line will lead to an error.

If the backup locks feature is not supported by the target server, but lock-for-backup is specified on the command line, mysqldump aborts with an error.