MySQL®

14. Database Maintenance, Backups, and Replication

Ideally, MySQL runs smoothly from the time that you first install it. But problems sometimes do occur for a variety of reasons, ranging from power outages to hardware failure to improper shutdown of the MySQL server (such as when you force-terminate it with kill -9 or when the server host crashes). Events such as these, many of which are beyond your control, can result in damage to database tables, typically caused by incomplete writes in the middle of table changes.

This chapter describes what you can do to minimize your risks and to be ready if disaster strikes anyway. The techniques covered here include making database backups, performing table checking and repair operations, and how to use ...