On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:03:52 +0900 Romeo Theriault romeotheriault@gmail.com wrote:
I think you might have to be a bit more clear about what you're hoping to accomplish and what your current setup is. How are you hosting your mysql data files? NFS, iscsi, fcp?
Yup. Sorry about that : the files containing data are stored on an NFS-mounted volume.
It sounds like you want to base a dev database off of a snapshot of a prod database (which is pretty normal) but then you want to eventually make the dev database the new prod database? and you're wondering how to make the server see the the new prod database on the flexclone volume? Is that an accurate summation?
Yes, mostly : essentially, we'd need several copies of some of our databases, so that we can strip information from some copies. The reason we want to do this is because this information is to be backed up a bit differently.
We could do it simply by copying the files and editing them directly (or starting a second RDBMS instance), but as the dataset in question is rather large (2TB), we'd rather skip the copy operation. So we came to the FlexClone idea. The question is : does this sounds implementable ?
We are also thinking about using FlexClone for rapid switching between dev and prod environments, but the main need is the above one. (I hope that I am clear enough now?)
We're mostly an oracle shop but I think in principle it's very similar. If you use nfs you'll just export and mount up the new prod volume to the prod server and point mysql at those datafiles and start it up. If you're using iscsi or fcp, you'll unmap the old lun{s} and then map the new prod lun to the server and mount them up, etc...
OK. Does Oracle for example offer some possibility of hot-switching between two database backends (because if Oracle doesn't, I seriously doubt MySQL will)?
Simon