Re:Amazon Aurora Backtrack
by cookiecaper on Friday May 11, 2018 @01:30PM
(#17049233)
Yeah, I know that Aurora already had point-in-time restore. It's disingenuous to pretend like this is something different. This is, at best, an upgrade to Amazon's processes to make the restore process smoother in the ways you've mentioned.
As the previous commentor said, this isn't point in time restore or a change in our processes. It is a change to our database and storage engine to mark regions of log-structured storage as if they did not occur. That's why we can complete a Backtrack in a few seconds - we're just moving some pointers around and restarting the database.
A good question is, how is it different. With PIT restores, they create a new instance from snapshot and play back the logs up to the relevant point. With this Aurora-only feature, they take advantage of Aurora's storage capabilities, and rewind the same database to a previous point. No new instance, no cold recovery from snapshot, no long log replay.