MySQL快照与SQL转储的优缺点

Question

What are the advantages/disadvantages of using database snapshots vs. backing up SQL dumps (from mysqldump )?

I find SQL dump files easy to backup and restore. It seems to be much faster than using database snapshots as well so I am not sure what's the point of using snapshots when they take longer to use.

For additional context, I use MySQL 5.6 and more specifically AWS RDS Aurora (MySQL edition).

Answer 1

Probably the most significant reason people use snapshots is that it can take days to import a large dump file.

Snapshots have several advantages:

• It's faster to create a snapshot or restore a snapshot after your database gets very large. You might not yet have a database that is large enough to show this advantage.
• You don't need an EC2 instance to run mysqldump on, nor do you need to provision storage for the dump file. The snapshot infrastructure takes care of both of those for you, as you invoke a snapshot in a "serverless" manner via GUI or API.
• Snapshot lifecycle management is included in the AWS console. You can auto-expire snapshots, or save them to Glacier, etc. You can do the same with dump files, but you're kind of on your own for managing them.

Dump files have advantages too:

• Dumps are in human-readable files. You can even use grep to search for data in a dump file.
• Dumps are more-or-less portable between platforms and MySQL versions.
• Dumps are a good way to transfer data between RDS and your on-prem data center (although there's a recent announcement that RDS now supports import using Percona XtraBackups).