How to compare the database of a backup from another environment

Hopefully, my previous research can be helpful for you. Here is a step-by-step guide I created when I had to move several very large databases to a data center. It uses log shipping.

Regards,
John

To begin with, storing ibdata on a separate volume from the datadir is a bad idea because of

• MetaData Issues : I wrote about this as well
  • Why does InnoDB store all databases in one file? (See WARNING)
  • How to Recover an InnoDB table whose files were moved around
  • Error 'Unknown table engine 'InnoDB'' on query. after restarting mysql
• Performance Issues : I wrote about that back in August 2011
  • MySQL InnoDB data file directly on a disk slice (fixed-size)?

Getting back to your problem, the reason LVM for ibdata1 is not good has to do with the metadata in ibdata1 at any given point-in-time. If you were to LVM Snapshot ibdata1, then create new tables, and drop some tables, somne of the corresponding .frm files within datadir would not match. The time needed to coalesce that large an ibdata would be astronomical (unless 21 hours is acceptable to you). I tried using rsync as opposed to LVM and I fared no better.

The safest and most sensible way to clear the space with innodb_file_per_table disabled is to do the following on the Slave

• Step 01) mysqldump all databases
• Step 02) shutdown mysql
• Step 03) delete ibdata1
• Step 04) startup mysql
• Step 05) reload the mysqldump

Without this method, ibdata1 can never be shrunk otherwise. Even in my post in StackOverflow on InnoDB Cleanup (using innodb_file_per_table), you have to do those same 5 steps.