How to see what was executed in the database via binlogs for specific date?

Question

I am trying figure out how to "query" binlogs to see what was exectued in the database for a specific date. For example, if I execute mysqlbinlog binlog then the thing just runs forever and it is had to see what exactly was executed there, especially if binlog is huge. Thank you!

Answer 1

You can give mysqlbinlog datetime stamps

Here is a sample datadir folder

[root@********* mysql]# ls -l /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.*
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1073742028 Aug 13 03:29 /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003111
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1073741943 Aug 15 13:37 /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003112
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql  434864318 Aug 16 16:00 /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003113
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql         57 Aug 15 13:37 /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.index

Suppose you want to see everything executed from 10:45 AM to 2:25 PM on Aug 14th. All of Aug 14th is in /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003112. Run the following:

mysqlbinlog --start-datetime="2012-08-14 10:45:00" --stop-datetime="2012-08-14 14:25:00" /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003112 > SQL.txt

If your range was Aug 13th 5:00PM to Aug 14th 2:00AM, you must span two binary logs. So, you would run the following:

mysqlbinlog --start-datetime="2012-08-13 17:00:00" --stop-datetime="2012-08-14 02:00:00" /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003111 /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.003112 > SQL.txt

Give it a Try !!!

Answer 2

quickest way I'd do it,

mysqlbinlog | grep 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM'

if you are setting the max binlog size to a high value or even not setting it at all (I think the default is 2 GB) then that is why mysqlbinlog takes a while to translate it and that is just how it's gonna be

another reason to make the bin log files huge and take a while to parse, is the replication mode you're using. Row based files are larger.