MySQL table Point-in-Time-Recovery from mysqldump backup

Sometimes we face the situation where we have a full MySQL database backup done with mysqldump and then we have to restore and recover just one single table out of our huge mysqldump file.
Further our mysqldump backup was taken hours ago so we want to recover all the changes on that table since our backup was taken up to the end.

In this blog article we cover all the steps needed to achieve this goal for MySQL and MariaDB.

Recommendation: It is recommended to do theses steps on a testing system and then dump and restore your table back to the production system. If you do it directly on your production system you have to know exactly what you are doing...
Further this process should be tested carefully and regularly to get familiar with it and to assure your backup/restore/recovery procedure works properly.

The table we want to recover is called test.test from our backup full_dump.sql.gz. As a first step we have to do the recovery with the following command to our test database:

shell> zcat full_dump.sql.gz | extract_table.py --database=test --table=test | mysql -u root

The script extract_table.py is part of the FromDual Recovery Manager to extract one single table from a mysqldump backup.

As a next step we have to extract the binary log file and its position where to start recovery from out of our dump:

shell> zcat full_dump.sql.gz | head -n 25 | grep CHANGE
CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_LOG_FILE='mysql-bin.000216', MASTER_LOG_POS=1300976;

Then we have to find out where we want to stop our Point-in-Time-Recovery. The need for recover is possibly due to a TRUCATE TABLE command or similar operation executed on the wrong system or it is just a time somebody has indicated us to recover to. The position to stop we can find as follows:

shell> mysqlbinlog -v mysql-bin.000216 | grep -B5 TRUNCATE --color
#150123 19:53:14 server id 35622  end_log_pos 1302950 CRC32 0x24471494  Xid = 3803
COMMIT/*!*/;
# at 1302950
#150123 19:53:14 server id 35622  end_log_pos 1303036 CRC32 0xf9ac63a6  Query   thread_id=54    exec_time=0       error_code=0
SET TIMESTAMP=1422039194/*!*/;
TRUNCATE TABLE test

And as a last step we have to apply all the changes from the binary log to our testing database:

shell> mysqlbinlog --disable-log-bin --database=test --start-position=1300976 --stop-position=1302950 mysql-bin.000216 | mysql -u root --force

Now the table test.test is recovered to the wanted point in time and we can dump and restore it to its final location back to the production database.

shell> mysqldump --user=root --host=testing test test | mysql --user=root --host=production test

This process has been tested on MySQL 5.1.73, 5.5.38, 5.6.22 and 5.7.5 and also on MariaDB 10.0.10 and 10.1.0.