Editor’s Note: Because our bloggers have lots of useful tips, every now and then we update and bring forward a popular post from the past. Today’s post was originally published on May 23, 2018.

In recent weeks I’ve been focusing on Docker in order to get a much better understanding of the containerized world that is materializing in front of us. Containers aren’t just for stateless applications anymore and we’re seeing more cases where MySQL and other databases are being launched in a containerized fashion, so it’s important to know how to configure your MySQL container!

In docker hub, you will see an option for this by doing a volume mount from the Docker host to the container on /etc/mysql/conf.d. But the problem is that the container image you’re using may …

In a previous post I had mentioned that I was doing a bit of digging into Docker in order to get a better grasp of the technology. Part of that was exploring common administrative tasks. I would venture to say that backups are probably among the most important tasks we take on with database administration, so it’s important to know how to do this for Docker MySQL instances.

There is a fair bit of documentation on how to handle this logically (mysqldump / mydumper) as this is a simple task to perform as long as you can connect to the database instance, so I wanted to approach physical backups using the very common xtrabackup tool. Additionally, we’re trying to think with containers here, so I wanted to make sure that not only would I be taking a backup of the Docker container MySQL instance, but I would do it with another Docker container running …

One of the widely discussed technologies at Percona Live Europe was the logistics of running MySQL in containers. Containers – particularly Docker – have become a hot topic, so there was a good-sized crowd on day one of the conference for Ashraf Sharif, Senior Support Engineer with Severalnines. He presented his talk “MySQL on Docker: Containerizing the Dolphin”. 

During his presentation, Ashraf shared some recommendations for best practices when setting out on containerizing MySQL. He sees the trend of moving to containers as a progression from the use of virtual hosts.

After his talk on day one of the Percona Live Europe conference, I caught up with Ashraf and asked about his presentation. I was interested in which concepts are most important for …