Migrate Data from MySQL-Compatible Databases

TiDB is highly compatible with MySQL. You can migrate data from any MySQL-compatible databases to TiDB smoothly, whether the data is from a self-hosted MySQL instance or RDS service provided by the public cloud.

This document describes how to use Dumpling to export data from MySQL-compatible databases and use TiDB Lightning logical import mode to import the data to TiDB Cloud.

Prerequisites

Before migrating data from MySQL-compatible databases into TiDB, ensure that the supported collations of TiDB Cloud can meet your requirements.

By default, TiDB Cloud supports the following CI collations:

• ascii_bin
• binary
• latin1_bin
• utf8_bin
• utf8_general_ci
• utf8_unicode_ci
• utf8mb4_bin
• utf8mb4_general_ci
• utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Step 1. Install TiUP

TiUP is a package manager in the TiDB ecosystem, which can help you run any TiDB cluster component with only a single line of command. In this document, TiUP is used to help you install and run Dumpling and TiDB Lightning.

1. Download and install TiUP:

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://tiup-mirrors.pingcap.com/install.sh | sh
   

2. Declare the global environment variable:

   Note

   After the installation, TiUP displays the absolute path of the corresponding profile file. In the following command, you need to modify .bash_profile to the path of your profile file.

   source .bash_profile
   

Step 2. Export data from MySQL-compatible databases

You can use several ways to dump data from MySQL, such as using mysqldump or mydumper. It is recommended to use Dumpling for higher performance and compatibility with TiDB, which is also one of the open source tools created by PingCAP.

1. Install Dumpling:

   tiup install dumpling
   

2. Export your MySQL database using Dumpling.

   • To export your data to Amazon S3 cloud storage, see Export data to Amazon S3 cloud storage.

   • To export your data to local data files, use the following command:

     tiup dumpling -h <mysql-host> -P 3306 -u <user> -F 64MiB -t 8 -o /path/to/export/dir
     

     If you want to export only some specified databases, use -B to specify a comma-separated list of database names.

     The minimum permissions required are as follows:

     • SELECT
     • RELOAD
     • LOCK TABLES
     • REPLICATION CLIENT

Step 3. Import data to TiDB Cloud

Depending on the location and size of your source data, the importing methods are different.

• If your source data is located in Amazon S3 cloud storage, take the following steps:

  1. Configure Amazon S3 access to allow TiDB cloud to access the source data in your Amazon S3 bucket. For more information, see configure Amazon S3 access.
  2. From the TiDB Cloud console, navigate to the TiDB Clusters page, and then click the name of your target cluster to go to its own overview page. In the upper-right corner, click Import Data, and then fill in the importing related information on the Data Import Task page.

• If your source data is in local files, do one of the following:

  • If the data is larger than 1 TB, it is recommended that you use Amazon S3 or GCS as a staging area to import or migrate data into TiDB Cloud. For more information, see Import or migrate from Amazon S3 or GCS to TiDB Cloud.
  • If the data is less than 1 TB, you can use the logical import mode of TiDB Lightning according to the following steps in this document.

The following steps show how to import local data to TiDB Cloud using the logical import mode of TiDB Lightning.

1. Install TiDB Lightning:

   tiup install tidb-lightning
   

2. Create a TiDB Lightning configuration file and configure the importing information.

   1. Create the TiDB Lightning configuration file.

      vim tidb-lighting.toml
      

   2. Configure the importing information.

      [lightning] 
      # The address and port to check TiDB Lightning metrics.
      status-addr = '127.0.0.1:8289'
      
      [tidb]
      # The target cluster information. Fill in one address of tidb-server. 
      # For example: 172.16.128.1
      host = "${host}" 
      # The port number of the target cluster. For example: 4000
      port = ${port number}
      # The target database username. For example: root
      user = "${user_name}" 
      # The target database password. 
      password = "${password}" 
      
      [tikv-importer]
      # The TiDB backend to be used for data importing. 
      backend = "tidb"
      
      [mydumper]
      # The data source directory, supporting local path and s3.
      # For example: `/data` for local path or `s3://bucket-name/data-path` for s3
      data-source-dir = "${data_path}"  
      
      # When Dumpling is used to export data, the corresponding table schemas are exported too by default. 
      # If you want TiDB Lightning to automatically create table schemas in TiDB Cloud according to the exported schemas, set no-schema to false. 
      no-schema = false
      

      If you want to configure TLS in the target TiDB cluster or do more configurations, see TiDB Lightning Configuration.

3. Import data into TiDB using TiDB Lightning:

   nohup tiup tidb-lightning -config tidb-lightning.toml > nohup.out &
   

   After the importing task is started, you can view the importing progress in either of the following ways:

   • To get the progress using command lines, grep the keyword progress in logs, which is updated every 5 minutes by default.
   • To get more monitoring metrics using the TiDB monitoring framework, see TiDB Lightning Monitoring.

See also

• Migrate Incremental Data from MySQL-Compatible Databases