hands-on lab

Rewinding a MySQL Amazon Aurora Database with Backtrack

Difficulty: Beginner

Duration: Up to 1 hour and 30 minutes

Students: 1,485

Rating: 4.7/5

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Description

Backtrack is a feature of Amazon Aurora MySQL databases that enables you to quickly and seamlessly "rewind" your database to an earlier point in time. The primary use-case for Backtrack is to easily and quickly restore data after a data loss event in a production environment. Common causes of data loss include:

User error when manually running SQL queries
Invalid or interrupted database schema migrations
Misconfigured applications
Malicious activity

Compared to other backup and restore options, Backtrack is fast. With a traditional Point in Time Restore (PITR), where your database is restored to a specific point in time, the process can be expected to take hours on large datasets. Backtrack can complete rewinding your database in minutes.

In this lab, you will populate an Amazon Aurora MySQL database with some sample data, delete some data to simulate a data loss event, use Backtrack to restore the database, and finally, you will use Amazon CloudWatch to examine Backtrack specific metrics that are available to you.