MySQL 1Z0-908 Glossary: Administration and Replication Terms

Use this glossary to clean up high-confusion DBA terms, then route misses back to the right support page.

High-value terms

• Binary log: The MySQL change log used for replication and point-in-time recovery.
• Failover: Moving service responsibility to another instance after a failure.
• InnoDB: MySQL’s main transactional storage engine with MVCC, redo, and crash-recovery features.
• Point-in-time recovery: Restoring from backup and then replaying changes up to a chosen moment.
• Replica: A server that receives and applies changes from a source.
• RPO: Recovery point objective, or how much data loss is acceptable.
• RTO: Recovery time objective, or how long service can be unavailable.
• Source: The server that produces binlog events for replication.
• TLS: Transport Layer Security used to protect connections in transit.
• Undo log: Metadata used to support rollback and consistent reads.

Common confusion pairs

• Backup vs replication: Backups protect recovery. Replication improves availability. Replication is not a full backup strategy.
• RPO vs RTO: RPO is acceptable data loss. RTO is acceptable downtime.
• Crash recovery vs point-in-time recovery: Crash recovery happens automatically after failure. Point-in-time recovery restores from backup and logs.
• Least privilege vs full administrative access: Least privilege reduces blast radius. Full admin access is not the default safe answer.
• Read replica vs HA failover target: A replica can help availability, but not every replica setup is a clean HA design by itself.

Where to review next

• Weekly sequence and runbook planning: Study Plan
• Backup, recovery, and replication traps: Cheat Sheet
• Last-week questions: FAQ
• Canonical Oracle and MySQL references: Resources