When users experience memory usage issues with any software, including MySQL®, their first response is to think that it’s a symptom of a memory leak. As this story will show, this is not always the case.

This story is about a bug.

All Percona Support customers are eligible for bug fixes, but their options vary. For example, Advanced+ customers are offered a HotFix build prior to the public release of software with the patch. Premium customers do not even have to use Percona software: we may port our patches to upstream for them. But for Percona products all Support levels have the right to have a fix.

Even so, this does not mean we will fix every unexpected behavior, even if we accept that behavior to be a valid bug. One of the reasons …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

In 2017 we have welcomed many new customers into the Percona fold. It’s always interesting to find out what challenges the Percona team helped them to address and how they chose their relationship with Percona. As unbiased champions of open source database software, our consultancy, support and managed services staff apply their expertise across a wide range of technologies. Here are just a few stories from the past year.

Scaling applications on Amazon RDS the right way

Specializing in on-demand transportation services, Grab needed a high-availability, high performing database engine to serve their rapidly growing application. Grab operates in over 30 densely populated …

Upstream platform vendors have announced the general end of life (EOL) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and its derivatives, as well as Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With this announcement comes some implications to support for Percona software running on these operating systems.

RHEL 5 was EOL as of March 31st, 2017 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was end of life as of April 28th, 2017. Pursuant to our end of life policies, we are announcing that these EOLs will go into effect for Percona software on August 1st, 2017. As of this date, we will no longer be producing new packages, binary builds, hotfixes, or bug fixes for Percona software on these platforms.

We …

In this post, I’ll discuss how database support is good for your enterprise.

Years ago when I worked for the MySQL Support organization at the original MySQL AB, we spoke about MySQL Support as insurance and focused on a value proposition similar to that of car insurance. You must purchase car insurance before the incident happens, or insurance won’t cover the damage. In fact, most places around the world require automobile insurance. Similarly, many organizations that leverage production-use technology have their own “insurance” by means of 24/7 support.

In my opinion, this is a very one-sided view that does not capture the full value (and ROI) that a database support contract with Percona provides. With a Percona support contract, you are assured that your database environment …

Today Percona announced the immediate availability of 24/7, enterprise-class support for MongoDB and TokuMX. The new support service helps organizations achieve maximum application performance without database bloat. Customers have round-the-clock access (365 days a year) to the most trusted team of database experts in the open source community.

The news means that Percona now offers support across the entire open-source database ecosystem, including the entire LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl), providing a single, expert, proven service provider for companies to turn to in good times (always best to be proactive) – and during emergencies, too.

Today’s support announcement follows …

We receive this question about the ibdata1 file in MySQL very often in Percona Support.

The panic starts when the monitoring server sends an alert about the storage of the MySQL server – saying that the disk is about to get filled.

After some research you realize that most of the disk space is used by the InnoDB’s shared tablespace ibdata1. You have innodb_file_per_table enabled, so the question is:

What is stored in ibdata1?

When you have innodb_file_per_table enabled, the tables are stored in their own tablespace but the shared tablespace is still used to store other InnoDB’s internal …