TL;DR

Percona XtraBackup is a 100% open-source backup solution for Percona Server for MySQL and MySQL®. It is designed for high-availability environments, performing online, non-blocking, and highly secure backups of transactional systems without interrupting your production traffic.

While full backups work for small databases, large-scale systems rely on incremental backups to save space and time. However, the “prepare” stage, required to make the incremental backups consistent, was slow because XtraBackup processed the .delta files serially. The .delta files are generated per table and store only the modifications since the last backup.

Great news! In XtraBackup versions …

Last week, ProxySQL announced that they are taking over the maintenance and development of Orchestrator, the MySQL high-availability and topology management tool originally authored by Shlomi Noach. You can read their announcement here: Announcing the future of Orchestrator.

We want to briefly share Percona’s position on the news.

We welcome this

Orchestrator became the de facto standard for MySQL topology management and automated failover, and it has been a foundational tool in the ecosystem for over a decade. When the upstream project was archived, many operators were left running internal forks. A revived project under active development, with a stated roadmap and continued Apache 2.0 licensing, is good news for the MySQL community, and we’re glad to see ProxySQL step up to take it on. Thanks are due to Shlomi Noach …

Introduction Replication performance depends on every stage in the pipeline, from the source database to transport and ultimately to commit on the replica. On the replica side, much of that performance comes down to how efficiently changes are read, scheduled, and applied under real operational pressure. In practice, that directly affects steady-state lag, backlog recovery […]

I have written a new post on the MySQL blog about the hypergraph optimizer, which is now available in MySQL 9.7 Community Edition.

The post gives a high-level technical overview of what is different from the classic join optimizer, why it can produce better plans for some multi-table queries, and where it is most useful to try. It also includes early benchmark results and some caveats, since the feature is still evolving and remains off by default.

On April 21, 2026, our third public discussion continued the conversation around transparency, participation, and the future of MySQL. Building on the momentum from earlier sessions, the discussion focused on progress and improvements to increase community transparency and practical ways for community members to get involved. At the center of the discussion was the MySQL […]

MySQL 9.7 Community Edition now includes the hypergraph optimizer as an alternative to the classic join optimizer, making this capability available across all MySQL editions. This is not a cosmetic change. The hypergraph optimizer uses a new join-planning framework aimed at queries where plan shape can make a real difference, particularly for multi-table joins, workloads […]

When people ask me how to tune MySQL, they usually mean, “Which variables should I change in my.cnf?” (the MySQL configuration file) That certainly is a reasonable place to start, because most day-to-day performance tuning really is driven by MySQL itself: memory allocation, redo flushing, connection handling, temporary tables, and InnoDB I/O behavior. But the […]

As an update to our recent blog post, “Where can you find MySQL next? (Updated events list for March–May 2026)” we’d like to share the latest confirmed MySQL events and webinars, including newly added ones plus refreshed details for sessions we already announced. Since plans and agendas evolve quickly, this post is intended to provide […]

As part of our MySQL community engagement plan, which includes delivering new features into MySQL Community Edition, increasing collaboration and transparency, and expanding and growing the MySQL Ecosystem, we have created a new rhythm of public MySQL Community Discussions—starting with our first session on February 25 and continuing with our second session on March 23, […]

Production data is invaluable for day-to-day operations—support, troubleshooting, analytics, and development. But when that data contains sensitive fields such as SSNs, emails, phone numbers, or other identifiers, broad read access can quickly become unnecessary exposure.  Just as importantly, many organizations operate under regulatory and contractual requirements that expect strong controls around access to sensitive data—often including data masking as […]