The Database Events page lets you find and view all the database events logged and copied during incremental backups. This is useful when you need to find a particular malicious or erroneous transaction so you can roll back the unintended change. Once you find the problem event, you can easily launch a restore operation that will roll back all changes to the moment before the damage occurred. To back up and restore at the transaction level requires that binary logging is enabled on the MySQL server.
The left panel displays a calender control that lets you select a backup icon from dates on which single or multiple backups where processed.
The right panel features controls that help you locate events within the selected backup. When you open the page, the right panel displays events from the selected backup date for the selected backup set. Binary log backups are stored as part of full and log incremental backups.
Parsing of binary logs from the backup images can take time (up to few minutes). To refresh the report page using Parse Events button at the bottom of the page (as shown below) The backup images are parsed again and report is re-populated.
There two methods for selecting a backup:
The calendar shows the dates on which full backup (level 0) and incremental backups (level 1) were performed. If the multiple backup runs happened on a calendar day, it is shown with a different icon. You can select any date that has full or incremental backups.
The binary logs in the backups are parsed and displayed in the database events window. When user selects a backup date, the backups done on that date are parsed. You can use Parse Events button to parse the backup image again. Page refresh will not parse backups again.
Note: If no backup exists for the selected date, then no data is displayed. This does not necessarily mean that database event logs do not exist for that date; they may be available from a binary log that was backed up subsequently. In other words, the Database Events log includes all data from a given backup to the next backup that included logged events.
After you have selected a backup that includes log data, the events viewer lists the events it contains in a summary list. You can click on the more link to get complete description of the event as shown below.
You can enter a text string to search for specific database events. You can use MySQL fulltext search Boolean operators to further control the search. For example, you can quote entire phrases to find them, and use plus (+) operator to refine searches on individual words.
All the search results are selected. The search results are also highlighted. It is possible to use the left and right arrow buttons next to the search box to go from one search result to another.
Search queries can be named and saved for future searches (Use Save button next to the search box). Clicking Open button next to the search box to use saved search queries. Saving search queries can help in performing the same queries on multiple backup sets or multiple backup dates.
After selecting the event(s) using the checkbox next to each event, you can restore to a selected event (of course, only one event should be selected) or restore only the selected events or restore everything except the selected event (undo selected events). Multiple events can be selected for restoration or undo the effects of the selected events. Restoring to a selected event is equivalent of point-in-time recovery i.e, all database events starting from last full backup to the specified event are restored.
Show selected events button shows all the selected events in one page as shown above. This can be used to review selected events and confirm the restoration process. Clicking Go in the Database event report or Restore in the selected events page takes you to Restore What page to continue with restoration process.
Selective restores should be performed carefully. Otherwise, there can be restoration failures or data loss. Few important points that user must be aware of: