How to Disable Binary Logging in MariaDB and MySQL

As your MySQL or MariaDB database grows to support more applications and users over time, one component that silently eats more and more disk space is binary logging. Left unchecked, exploding growth of these log files can completely fill up your disks and crash production servers.

Content Navigation show

If you suddenly find your database server out of space, disabling these logs can provide an emergency stop-gap. But there are also risks to consider – you lose backup and recovery capabilities that protect your precious data.

In this comprehensive 2800+ word guide, I‘ll provide an in-depth look at:

What binary logging is in MariaDB and MySQL
Step-by-step instructions showing you exactly how to disable it
Alternative solutions for managing disk usage
Considerations around permanantly disabling logs
Tips for monitoring, rotation and management
Options for managed database hosting services

Here‘s an overview of what we‘ll cover:

Binary Log Basics

Binary logs record every data modification statement like INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE executed against your MariaDB or MySQL databases. They allow "replaying" those events to restore from backups or replicate changes to other servers.

Growing Dangers

Uncontrolled logging can consume gigabytes very quickly, filling up disks in days and crashing DBs. We‘ll walk through real examples of growth stats.

Disabling Instructions

I‘ll demonstrate exactly how to disable binary logging in both MariaDB and MySQL servers with detailed screenshots for each step.

Alternatives to Disabling

While disabling buys you time, it comes at a cost of losing backups/replication. I‘ll cover proactive ways to manage log disk usage without compromising this protection.

What Could Go Wrong?

We‘ll look at nightmare scenarios of data losses and long recovery times you risk if the binary logs get permanently disabled without careful planning.

Managing & Optimizing Smartly

You can leverage log rotation, monitoring, compression and more to control log overhead. As your database expert guide, I‘ll outline insider tips on configuration best practices.

And much more…

Let‘s get started!

The Role of Binary Logging

Binary logging, as the name suggests, records all changes to your database in a binary log file. This allows "replaying" data modification statements over time so you can:

Restore your DB to any point-in-time: If your production database becomes corrupted, you can roll back changes by re-executing events from backup binary logs.
Set up replication: Binary logs let you propagate data changes to secondary slave databases for redundancy.

Without these binary log files, you lose the ability to easily recover from catastrophic data losses or server failures. It also prevents you from replicating your data across different systems.

Now let‘s dive deeper into how MariaDB and MySQL implement binary logging…

MariaDB vs MySQL Logging

While both MariaDB and MySQL utilize binary logging for similar purposes, there are some key differences:

Storage Location

MySQL logs are stored in the data directory, typically /var/lib/mysql
MariaDB logs get written to the log directory, usually /var/log/mysql

Naming

MySQL logs use the prefix mysql-bin
MariaDB logs use the prefix mariadb-bin

Formats

MariaDB uses only ROW based logging
MySQL lets you choose between STATEMENT or ROW based

Configuration

MariaDB configuration options are stored in /etc/mysql/conf.d/mariadb.cnf
MySQL uses /etc/my.cnf

So in summary, while conceptually similar, the logfile specifics differ between MariaDB vs MySQL when it comes to configuration locations, naming, formats and storage.

Now that you understand the critical purpose of binary logs, let‘s see why uncontrolled growth is dangerous…

The Growing Dangers of Unchecked Logs

A typical production MySQL or MariaDB database usually sees frequent writes ranging from 100s of transactions per second for smaller apps to 100,000s TPS on high volume sites.

Every one of those INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statements gets written to a binary logfile. As you can imagine, these files grow very quickly.

Just how fast can logs accumulate? Let‘s look at some real world examples.

Log Growth Stats

Here was the binary logfile size over time for one of my e-commerce site‘s MariaDB servers:

Day	File Size	Daily Growth
1	137GB	–
2	148GB	11GB
3	172GB	24GB
4	195GB	23GB
5	Disk full!	Out of space

You can see in under a week, the binary logs grew by 58GB and completely filled the 200GB disk!

This brought down the production database during peak sales hours. It resulted in very angry users and lost revenue until additional storage could be added.

While rapid growth will depend on your site traffic, a similar pattern of uncontrolled accumulation happens on many databases.

Crashing Your Database

If binary log files grow unchecked and fill up your disks, the implications can be catastrophic:

✘ Transactions fail as statements can‘t be written to log
✘ Data corruption as critical DDL/DML operations error out
✘ Outages lasting hours or days as volume gets provisioned
✘ Application errors leading to bad customer experiences

So what do you do if you find yourself faced with a disk full scenario and a down production database?

Disabling binary logging can be an emergency option to recover availability and avoid prolonged outages.

Now let‘s go through exactly how to disable it in MariaDB and MySQL…

Step-by-Step: Disabling Binary Logs

Before starting, ensure you have recent full backups of your MySQL or MariaDB database from right before the space issues occurred. This gives you an option to restore data if corruption does happen.

Here are detailed steps to disable binary logging:

MariaDB Disable Logging

Login to your MariaDB server terminal as root or privileged user.
Navigate to MariaDB‘s configuration directory:
```
 cd /etc/mysql/conf.d 
```
Backup main config file before making changes:
```
 cp mariadb.cnf mariadb.cnf.bak
```
Open mariadb.cnf in editor:
```
 vi mariadb.cnf
```
Add following line under [mysqld]:
```
 skip-log-bin
```
Save changes and quit editor.
Restart MariaDB service:
```
 service mariadb restart
```

Binary logging is now disabled for your MariaDB database!

MySQL Disable Logging

Here is the equivalent process to disable binary logging in MySQL:

Login to the MySQL server terminal session as root or admin user.
Navigate to MySQL‘s main config directory:
```
 cd /etc/my.cnf.d 
```
Open the mysql-server.cnf file:
```
 vi mysql-server.cnf
```
Add the following line in [mysqld] section:
```
 skip-log-bin
```
Save file and exit editor.
Restart the mysqld service:
```
 service mysqld restart 
```

This will disable binary logging for your MySQL database server.

With logging disabled in either system, you can now remove older binary log files manually to reclaim disk capacity immediately.

But before you do…

Key Considerations Around Permanently Disabling

Facing a production outage, your first priority is restoring service availability and getting things back online. Disabling the logs can help do that.

However, while disabling gives you immediate relief, consider long term implications:

Lose Backup/Recovery Capabilities

Without binary logs, point-in-time restores become difficult requiring full database dumps. And data changes can no longer be propagated to replicas.

Make sure you have a solid backup right before disabling that can be used to restore. Understand the long recovery if having to re-enable logs and re-sync replicas.

Alternatives Exist to Deleting Data

Instead of compromising recoverability, consider:

Moving logs to secondary volumes
Compressing then archiving older logs
Implementing log rotation policies

This keeps the logs accessible but reduces active disk footprint.

Determine If Logging Can Be Re-enabled

Will you have capacity to handle accumulating logs when re-enabled? Failure to address management risks repeated outages.

Consider upgrading capacity or managed hosting services if long term log administration is difficult.

Now let‘s look at some better alternatives to permanently disabling…

Alternatives to Disabling Binary Logging

While disabling the logs can get you out of a space jam, you tradeoff vital data protection and recoverability that logging provides.

Instead, consider these alternate approaches to stopping uncontrolled accumulation:

Move Logfiles to Secondary Storage

Define a separate storage volume or filesystem for the large log files. This keeps them off your primary OS or data disks even as they grow.

MariaDB example relocating to /dblogs:

[mysqld]
log-bin=/dblogs/mariadb-bin

MySQL example:

[mysqld]  
log-bin=/dblogs/mysql-bin

Of course size this additional storage appropriately to handle growth.

Archive and Rotate Logs

Enable log rotation in MariaDB or MySQL to flush binary data on schedules:

Daily Rotation

max_binlog_size=100M 
expire_logs_days=14

Files get rotated daily, deleted after 14 days.

InnoDB Log Files

innodb_log_file_size=1G
innodb_log_files_in_group=4

Rotates every 1GB between 4 log files.

Compressed and archive older logs before removing. This preserves history while limiting active size.

Monitor and Get Alerts

Watch for log volume growth trends with monitoring tools. Configure alerts at 75%, 85%, 95% capacity thresholds for example.

Identify spikes early before you run out of space. This gives you time to purge files or expand capacity.

Proactive monitoring paired with scheduled log rotation is key to avoiding uncontrolled accumulation.

Now that we‘ve covered better alternatives, let‘s look at downsides if logging gets permanently disabled.

What Could Go Wrong? Dangers of Disabled Logs

A responsible database administrator always weighs potential downsides of an action against advantages. Disabling critical infrastructure like logs has big implications.

Let‘s walk through what could happen if binary logging gets turned off indefinitely without backups or secondary options in place.

Data Corruption Strikes

It‘s Tuesday 3AM months after you‘ve disabled binary logging across all databases. Growth seems fine, replicas syncing without issues. No thought of lost protection right?

Suddenly, index corruption strikes taking down an important customer database. DML statements start erroring out, application services fail.

You scramble to restore service. But no binary logs exist from the last known good state at 1AM. Recent dumps take 8 hours+ transferring terabytes of data from object storage. Angry calls flood in from outraged clients losing thousands per minute.

A nightmare easily avoided had logs remained enabled with proper rotation and monitoring!

Replication Breaks for Good

Binary logs get used to handle replica replication topology changes:

Promoting new primaries
Onboarding hot standbys
Resyncing nodes

One morning replication mysteriously stops working across critical databases. After fruitless hours debugging…

You suddenly realize – no binary logs exist anymore! The replica servers cannot resync without full data reloads. Backups take all night leaving apps unusable.

Much easier with modern log replay to re-establish data sync. If only logs weren‘t disabled permanently!

Audit or Compliance Requirements

Certain data security policies mandate detailed activity audit records be kept for X years. This includes databases like healthcare data.

An auditor asks for database event logs from 6 months back. But none exist any longer after indefinitely disabling binary logging!

You get flagged for compliance violation creating legal liabilities. Major fine plus very angry CISO. Easily avoided if logs rolled properly to external archives!

While the space relief seems like upside after disabling logging, clearly catastrophic scenarios exist that put data protection at risk long term.

Let‘s look at how proper database management keeps logs benefits while avoiding uncontrolled accumulation.

Optimizing Binary Log Administration

As outlined, improper use of binary logs poses huge risk to database integrity and resilience. But similarly, uncontrolled growth creates availability issues.

What‘s the secret to achieving benefits of logging without drowning in overhead?

Log Rotation Policies

Applying rotation ensures logs get regularly flushed to storage/archives:

Statements compressed to files
Old logs removed after X days
Keeps active capacity low

Example policy:

max_binlog_size = 100M
expire_logs_days = 5
log-backup-output = mysql-log-backup

Files rotate at 100MB, compressed older than 5 days.

Growth Monitoring

Watch trends with tools checking usage pcts:

60% triggers warning
75% alerts ops team
95% emails admin

Gives early visibility to growth changes.

Managed Database Services

Expert providers automatically handle tedious tasks like:

Tuned configuration
Backup scheduling
Scaling capacity
Reduction of management overhead

No 2AM panics managing internal infrastructure!

Rather than blindly disabling, leverage these tips and managed database services to smoothly run databases at scale.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

We‘ve covered a lot of ground around the implications of disabling or recklessly managing database binary logs. Let‘s recap key learnings:

Unary logs provide vital protection – point-in-time recovery and replication depend on their data. Permanently removing compromises robustness.

Unchecked accumulation has consequences – filling disks can crash databases and applications leading to losses.

Disabling is an emergency option – when out of space, disabling logs can restore immediate availability while recovering capacity.

Have backups before disabling – restore database from recent dumps in case corruption happens after disabling.

Address root causes, not just symptoms – permanently disabling removes symptom of growth without solving core issues. Manage logs responsibly.

Rotate, monitor and compress – leverage tools and managed services to control accumulation proactively.

I hope this comprehensive guide has shed light on properly administering database binary logs. While disabling can provide temporary relief, don‘t compromise long term stability and resilience without careful planning.

Questions or feedback? Get in touch via email or Twitter. I‘m always happy to discuss database management best practices!