We have a 5 node replication set up on our development server. We are looking for a way to allow developers to back up a subset of data in a mongo db and restore this to their local development enviroments.
We have looked into the clonedb and the mongodump utils, but both only allow for a backup/dump of the complete database. Due to the possible size of the database, we need an option that allows us to limit the data being backed up or restored.
Do any know of a util or way to achieve this?
I just stumbled upon this question again and decided to add a description of our backup strategy we opt in for:
Current back up strategy for our mongo db this server consist of 2 setups; backup via delayed passive secondarynode and daily backup using mongodump (takes journalling and oplog into play).
Besides our normal production nodes, we have setup another secondary node with a priority of 0 (this can either be on its own server or piggy backing off another mongo server but using a seperate port), hidden as true and a delay of 7200 seconds (2hours). This slave is there for "butter fingers", when some one accidentally drops a database or clears a collection, we have 2 hours before these changes replicate to this passive secondary. The passive secondary can NOT be used for READING or WRITING. It's role is simply a back up node. We also use this node for nightly backup to prevent unnecessary overhead on any of the other nodes.
The nightly backup is set to run every night at 23:00 via a cron tab. The command simply executes a script setup in /opt/auto-mongo-backup. This script can be found at https://github.com/jaconel/automongobackup (originally found it at https://github.com/micahwedemeyer/automongobackup). This script allows for a single nightly cron to cover weekly backups and monthly backups. Back ups are saved at /var/backups/mongodb.
Hope this helps some one out.
Related
What's a quick and efficient way to transfer a large Mongo database?
I want to transfer a 10GB production Mongo 3.4 database to a staging environment for testing. I used the mongodump/mongorestore tools to test this transfer to my localhost, but it took over 8 hours and consumed a massive amount of CPU and memory, which is something I'd like to avoid in the future. The database doesn't have any indexes, so the mongodump option to exclude indexes doesn't increase performance.
My staging environment will mostly be read-only, but it will still need to write occasionally, so it can't be setup as a permanent read replica of production.
I've read about [replication sets][1], but they seem very complicated to setup and designed for permanent mirroring of a primary to two or more secondaries. I've read some posts about people hacking this to be temporary, so they can do a one-time mirroring, but I can't find any reliable documentation since this isn't the intended usage of the feature. All the guides I've read also say you need at least 3 servers, which seems unintuitive since I only have 2 (production and staging) and don't want to create a third.
Several options exist today (2020-05-06).
Copy Data Directory
If you can take the system offline you can copy the data directory from one host to another then set the configuration to point to this directory and start up the new mongod.
Mongomirror
Mongomirror (https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/import/mongomirror/) is intended to be a tool to migrate from on-premises to Atlas, but this tool can be leveraged to copy data to another on-premises host. Beware, this connection requires SSL configurations on source and target to transfer.
Replicaset
MongoDB has built-in High Availability features using a replica set model (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/deploy-replica-set/). It is not overly complicated and works very well. This option allows the original system to stay online while replication does its magic. Once the replication completes reconfigure the replica set to be a single node replica set referring only to the new host and shut down the original host. This configuration is referred to as a single-node replica set. Having a single node replica set offers benefits over a stand-alone installation in that the replica set underpinnings (oplog) are the basis for other features such as change streams (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/changeStreams/)
Backup and Restore
As you mentioned you can use mongodump/mongorestore. There is a point in time where the backup must be restored. During this time it is expected the original system is offline and not accepting any additional writes. This method is robust but has downtime associated with it. You could use mongoexport/mongoimport to use a JSON file as an intermediate step but this is not recommended as BSON data types could be lost in translation.
Per Mongo documentation, you should be able to cp/rsync files for creating a backup (if you are able to halt write ops temporarily on your production setup - or if you do this during a maintenance window)
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/backups/#back-up-by-copying-underlying-data-files
Back Up with cp or rsync
If your storage system does not support snapshots, you can copy the files >directly using cp, rsync, or a similar tool. Since copying multiple files is not >an atomic operation, you must stop all writes to the mongod before copying the >files. Otherwise, you will copy the files in an invalid state.
Backups produced by copying the underlying data do not support point in time >recovery for replica sets and are difficult to manage for larger sharded >clusters. Additionally, these backups are larger because they include the >indexes and duplicate underlying storage padding and fragmentation. mongodump, >by contrast, creates smaller backups.
FYI - for replica sets, the third "server" is an arbiter which exists to break the tie when electing a new primary. It does not consume as many resources as the primary/secondaries. Since you are looking to creating a staging environment, i would not recommend creating a replica set that includes production and staging env. Your primary instance could switch over to the staging instance and clients who are meant to access production instance will end up reading/writing from staging instance.
One of our clients have a server running a MongoDB instance and we have to build an analytical application using the data stored in their MongoDB database which changes frequently.
Clients requirements are:
That we do not connect to their MongoDB instance directly or run another instance of MongoDB on their server but just somehow run our own MongoDB instance on our machine in our office using their MongoDB database directory with read only access remotely.
We've suggested deploying a REST application, getting a copy of their database dump but they did not want that. They just want us to run our own MongoDB intance which is hooked up with the MongoDB instance directory. Is this even possible ?
I've been searching for a solution for the past two days and we have to submit a solution by Monday. I really need some help.
I think this is normal request because analytical queries could cause too much load on the production server. It is pretty normal to separate production and analytical databases.
The easiest option is to use MongoDB replication. Set up MongoDB replica set with production database instance as primary and analytical database instance as secondary, also configure the analytical instance to never become primary.
If it is not possible to use replication - for example client doesn't want this, the servers could not connect directly to each other... - there is another option. You can read oplog from remote database and apply operations to your database instance. This is exactly the low level mechanism how replica set works, but you can do it manually too. For example MMS (Mongo Monitoring Sevice) Backup uses reading oplog for online backups of MongoDB.
Update: mongooplog could be the right tool for real-time application of replication oplog pulled from remote server on local server.
I don't think that running two databases that points to the same database files is possible or even recommended.
You could use mongorestore to restore from their data files directly, but this will only work if their mongod instance is not running (because mongorestore will need to lock the directory).
Another solution will be to do file system snapshots and then restore to your local database.
The downside to this backup/restore solutions is that your data will not be synced all the time.
Probably the best solution will be to use replica sets with hidden members.
You can create a replica set with just two members:
Primary - this will be the client server.
Secondary - hidden, with votes and priority set to 0. This will be your local instance.
Their server will always be primary (because hidden members cannot become primaries). Clients cannot see hidden members so for all intents and purposes your server will be read only.
Another upside to this is that the MongoDB replication will do all the "heavy" work of syncing the data between servers and your instance will always have the latest data.
I have an app that can run in offline mode. If offline it uses a local mongo database, if it has a data connection it will use a remote mongo database.
Is there an easy way to sync these two databases and make sure they both have the union of their collections and documents?
EDIT: Effectively there are two databases that could both have insertions and deletions happening on them that aren't happening on the other. At fixed points in time I would like to have both databases show the union of them both.
For example over a period of time.
DB1.insert(A)
DB1.insert(B)
DB2.insert(C)
DB1.remove(A)
RUN SYNC
DB1 = DB2 = {B, C}
EDIT2: Been doing some reading. It's not the intended purpose but could they be set up as slaves replica sets of the remote and used that way? Problem is that I think replicas need to have a replica hosts must be accessible by way of resolvable DNS. Not sure how the remote could access local host.
You could use replica set but MongoDB doesn’t support master-master replication. Let's assume if you have setup like this:
two nodes with priority 1 which will be used as remote servers
single arbiter to ensure majority if one of remotes dies
5 local dbs with priority set as 0
When your application goes offline, it will stay secondary so you won't be able to perform writes. When you go online it will sync changes from remote dbs but you still need some way of syncing local changes. One of dealing with could be using local fallback db which will be used for writes when you are offline. When you go online, you push all new records to master. A little bit trickier could be dealing with updates but it is doable.
Another problem is that it won't scale up if you'll need to add more applications. If I remember correctly, there is a 12 nodes per replica set limit. For small cluster DNS resolution could be solved by using ssh tunnels.
Another way of dealing with a problem could be using small restful service and document timestamps. Whenever app is online it can periodically push local inserts to remote and pull data from remote db.
I would like to have 2 databases: production and offline. My system will work with the production one. But time to time I would like to copy changes from production db to offline db.
In CouchDB you can use something like:
POST /_replicate HTTP/1.1
{"source":"example-database","target":"http://example.org/example-database"}
Is there other way than:
mongodump/mongorestore
db.cloneDatabase( "db0.example.net" )
...in mongoDB? I understand those operations as copying full content of database. Is that correct?
It sounds like you have a few options here depending on the constraints your database system has. In addition to the options above, you could also:
Set your offline database up as a secondary as part of a replica set. This replica could then be used for your offline work and would keep in sync with the primary. The added benefit to this is you will always have an additional copy of your data in case you run into issues with the primary. You may want to mark the "offline" replica as hidden so that it could never take over as primary. See the following links for more information: Replication in MongoDB, Replication Internals
If you really just want point in time snap shots then another option would be to backup your database files and restore them to your offline cluster. The methods to do this vary according to your database setup and environment. The following is a good start for learning about backups: MongoDB Backups
I know that MongoDB can scale vertically. What about if I am running out of disk?
I am currently using EC2 with EBS. As you know, I have to assign EBS for a fixed size.
What if the MongoDB growth bigger than the EBS size? Do I have to create a larger EBS and Copy & Paste the files?
Or shall we start more MongoDB instance and each connect to different EBS disk? In such case, I could connect to a different instance for different databases.
If you're running out of disk, you obviously need to get a bigger disk.
There are several ways to migrate your data, it really depends on the type of up-time you need. First steps of course involve bundling the machine and creating the new volume.
These tips go from easiest to hardest.
Can you take the database completely off-line for several minutes?
If so, do this (migration by copy):
Mount new EBS on the server.
Stop your app from connecting to Mongo.
Shut down mongod and wait for everything to write (check the logs)
Copy all of the data files (and probably the logs) to the new EBS volume.
While the copy is happening, update your mongod start script (or config file) to point to the new volume.
Start mongod and check connection
Restart your app.
Can you take the database off-line for just a few minutes?
If so, do this (slaving and switch):
Start up a new instance and mount the new EBS on that server.
Install / start mongod as a --slave pointing at the current database. (you may need to re-start the current as --master)
The slave will do a fresh synchronization. Once the slave is up-to-date, you'll do a "switch" (next steps).
Turn off writes from the system.
Shut down the original mongod process.
Re-start the "new" mongod as a master instead of the slave.
Re-activate system writes pointing at the new master.
Done correctly those last three steps can happen in minutes or even seconds.
Can you not afford any down-time?
If so, do this (master-master):
Start up a new instance and mount the new EBS on that server.
Install / start mongod as a master and a slave against the current database. (may need to re-start current as master, minimal down-time?)
The new computer should do a fresh synchronization.
Once the new computer is up-to-date, switch the system to point at the new server.
I know it seems like this last version is actually the best, but it can be a little dicey (as of this writing). The reason is simply that I've honestly had a lot of issues with "Master-Master" replication, especially if you don't start with both active.
If you plan on using this method, I highly suggest a smaller practice run first. If something bombs here, Mongo might simply wipe all of your data files which will have the effect of taking more stuff down.
If you get a good version of this please post the commands, I'd like to see it in action.
Doesn't the E in EBS stand for elastic meaning something like resizing on the fly?
Currently the MongoDB team is working on finishining sharding which will allow you horizontal scaling by partitioning data separately on different servers. Give it a month or two and it will work fine. The developers are quite good at keeping their promises.
http://api.mongodb.org/wiki/current/Sharding%20Introduction.html
http://api.mongodb.org/wiki/current/Sharding%20Limits.html
You could slave the bigger disk off the smaller until it's caught up
or
fsync+lock and take a file system snapshot and copy it onto the bigger disk.
well, I am using Mongo DB now. I am pretty amazed the performance it generated, especially on some simple sorting.
I believe it's a good tool for simple web application logic. The remaining concern for is how to scale and backup. I will continue to explore.
The only disadvantage I have is that I didn't have any good tools to reveal the data stored inside. For example, I want to put my logging from MYSQL into Mongo as well. However, it's pretty difficult for me to view the log. Previously, i can use MYSQL query to fetch what I want easily.
Anyway, it's a good tool and I will continue to use it.