The xbstream binary¶
To support simultaneous compression and streaming, a new custom streaming format called xbstream was introduced to Percona XtraBackup in addition to the TAR format. That was required to overcome some limitations of traditional archive formats such as tar, cpio and others which did not allow streaming dynamically generated files, for example dynamically compressed files. Other advantages of xbstream over traditional streaming/archive format include ability to stream multiple files concurrently (so it is possible to use streaming in the xbstream format together with the –parallel option) and more compact data storage.
This utility has a tar-like interface:
-
with the
-x
option it extracts files from the stream read from its standard input to the current directory unless specified otherwise with the-c
option. Support for parallel extraction with the--parallel
option has been implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7. -
with the
-c
option it streams files specified on the command line to its standard output. -
with the
--decrypt=ALGO
option specified xbstream will automatically decrypt encrypted files when extracting input stream. Supported values for this option are:AES128
,AES192
, andAES256
. Either--encrypt-key
or--encrypt-key-file
options must be specified to provide encryption key, but not both. This option has been implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7. -
with the
--encrypt-threads
option you can specify the number of threads for parallel data encryption. The default value is1
. This option has been implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7. -
the
--encrypt-key
option is used to specify the encryption key that will be used. It can’t be used with--encrypt-key-file
option because they are mutually exclusive. This option has been implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7. -
the
--encrypt-key-file
option is used to specify the file that contains the encryption key. It can’t be used with--encrypt-key
option. because they are mutually exclusive. This option has been implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7.
The utility also tries to minimize its impact on the OS page cache by using the
appropriate posix_fadvise()
calls when available.
When compression is enabled with xtrabackup all data is being compressed, including the transaction log file and meta data files, using the specified compression algorithm. Percona XtraBackup supports the following compression algorithms:
quicklz
Note
Starting with Percona XtraBackup 8.0.31-24 using qpress/QuickLZ to compress backups is deprecated and may be removed in future versions. We recommend using either LZ4
or Zstandard (ZSTD
) compression algorithms.
The resulting files have the qpress archive format. Every \*.qp
file
produced by xtrabackup is essentially a one-file qpress archive and can be extracted and uncompressed by the qpress file archiver
. This means that there is no need to decompress entire backup to restore a single table as with tar.gz
.
To decompress individual files, run xbstream with the
--decompress
option. You may control the number of threads
used for decompressing by passing the --decompress-threads
option.
Also, files can be decompressed using the qpress tool. The tool supports multi-threaded decompression.
lz4
To compress files using the lz4
compression algorithm, set --compress
option to lz4
:
$ xtrabackup --backup --compress=lz4 --target-dir=/data/backup
Zstandard (ZSTD)
The Zstandard (ZSTD) compression algorithm is a tech preview feature. Before using ZSTD in production, we recommend that you test restoring production from physical backups in your environment, and also use the alternative backup method for redundancy.
Percona XtraBackup 8.0.30-23 adds support for the Zstandard (ZSTD)
compression algorithm. ZSTD
is a fast lossless compression algorithm that targets real-time compression scenarios and better compression ratios.
To compress files using the ZSTD
compression algorithm, use the --compress=zstd
option. The resulting files have the \*.zst
format.
You can specify ZSTD
compression level with the --compress-zstd-level(=#)
option. The defaul value is 1
.
$ xtrabackup --backup --compress-zstd-level=1 --target-dir=/data/backup
To decompress files, use the --decompress
option.