[slurm-users] slurmdbd full backup so the primary can be purged

[Loris Bennett]

Hi Paul,

Am I right in assuming that there are going to be some limitations to
loading archived data w.r.t. version of slurmdbd used to create the
archive and that used to read it?

Cheers,

Loris

Paul Edmon <pedmon at cfa.harvard.edu> writes:

> Files generated by the slurmdbd archive are read back into the live database by sacctmgr.  See:
>
> archive load
>
> Load in to the database previously archived data. The archive file will not be loaded if the records already exist in the database - therefore, trying to load an archive file more than once will result in an error. When this data is again archived and
> purged from the database, if the old archive file is still in the directory ArchiveDir, a new archive file will be created (see ArchiveDir in the slurmdbd.conf man page), so the old file will not be overwritten and these files will have duplicate records. 
>
> File=
>  File to load into database. The specified file must exist on the slurmdbd host, which is not necessarily the machine running the command. 
> Insert=
>  SQL to insert directly into the database. This should be used very cautiously since this is writing your sql into the database. 
>
> So you could set up a full mirror and then read the old archives into that.  You just want to make sure that mirror has archiving/purging turned off so it won't rearchive the data you restored.
>
> -Paul Edmon-
>
> On 12/10/2021 1:28 PM, Ransom, Geoffrey M. wrote:
>
>   
>
>  Hello
>
>     Our slurmdbd database is getting rather large and affecting performance, but we want to keep usage data around for a few years for metric purposes in order to figure out how our users work. I read a suggestion to have a backup DB
>  which has all the usage data synced to it for metric purposes and a main slurmdbd setup for the cluster to use that cleans out old data based on your user working needs.
>
>   
>
>  Is there any documentation suggesting how to set up a second slurmdbd server that will receive a copy of all the main slurmdbd entries without purging so we can start purging on the in use slurmdbd service to keep short term
>  performance snappy? Presumably the upgrade process will be complicated by this as well since we have to keep the archive slurmdbd setup in sync with the cluster slurmdbd.
>
>   
>
>  Thanks.
>
>   
>
>  *EDIT before hitting send*   I was re-reading the slurmdbd.conf man page and just saw the Archive* options and this sounds like it would work to implement something like this.
>
>  Are archive files readable by sacct and sreport, or easily manually parseable?  
>
>  I am going to turn these on in my test cluster, but hearing about other peoples experiences with this would probably be helpful.
>
-- 
Dr. Loris Bennett (Herr/Mr)
ZEDAT, Freie Universität Berlin         Email loris.bennett at fu-berlin.de