I was recently asked about if MySQL Enterprise Backup would be able to restore single databases. My initial answer was that this was complicated, but might be doable with the Transportable Table Space (TTS) option. But first let's go back to the basics. A common way of working with mysqldump is to get a list of databases and then loop through the databases and dump the data and schema to a SQL file. But both backups and restores will take a lot of time if the size of the database grows. And it's a luke-warm backup at best instead of a hot backup. So that's why we have MySQL Enterprise Backup. MySQL Enterprise Backup allows you to make a hot backup of InnoDB tables by copying the datafiles while watching the InnoDB redo log files. On disk the data from the InnoDB storage engine consists of a system tablespace (one of more ibdataX files), the redo log files (iblogfileX) and zero or more table-specific tablespace files (*.ibd). The data dictionary data is located in ...