MySQL 9.7, a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, incorporates a variety of potential features spanning across multiple technical domains. This article covers some of the primary features introduced and evaluates their practical utility within the MySQL database environment.

Following the End-of-Life (EOL) status of MySQL 8.0, this subsequent LTS release is designed to provide enhanced stability alongside significant architectural innovations.

Let’s discuss each of these features below with some examples and usage.

Flow-control monitoring in Group Replication

Flow control monitoring has been improved and provides more granularity by introducing the additional status variables listed below.

• Gr_flow_control_throttle_count : It denotes the number of transactions that have been throttled.
• Gr_flow_control_throttle_time_sum :It denotes the time in microseconds that transactions have been …

About a year ago, we discussed how MyDumper refactored its locking mechanisms to move away from old, rigid flags and transitioned towards more flexible, streamlined execution. Since then, the MyDumper community hasn’t stood still.

In recent releases, the locking architecture was further standardized under a single overarching option: --sync-thread-lock-mode. Along with this modernization came a powerful new safety feature designed to give you lock-free thread synchronization without risking silent inconsistency: SAFE_NO_LOCK (merged in PR #2031).

Let’s explore the new thread-synchronization landscape and break down when you should use each mode.

What is --sync-thread-lock-mode?

Previously, flags like …

Managing data retention policies is one of the most common operational tasks in MySQL.

Applications continuously generate transactional, audit, logging, telemetry, and event data. Over time, these tables can grow to billions of rows, causing:

• Larger backups
• Longer recovery times
• Reduced buffer pool efficiency
• Slower index maintenance
• Increased storage costs
• Degraded query performance

To address these problems, organizations typically implement retention policies based on dates or timestamps. Examples include deleting events older than 90 days or purging session data older than 30 days and so forth. The deleted data can then eventually be archived somewhere else, like in another DBMS or on external files.

One of the most widely used tools for implementing these policies in MySQL ecosystems is pt-archiver, part of the Percona Toolkit. …

In this blog, I am going to share a real-world debugging case study where a routine Percona XtraDB Cluster node restart led to an unexpected failure. I will walk through what we observed, what we checked, and how we ultimately identified the root cause.

Let’s see how the maintenance goes. It was supposed to be a simple restart. The kind you’ve done a hundred times. You SSH in, run the maintenance, bring the node back up, and go grab a coffee. Except this time, the coffee went cold on the desk… because MySQL refused to start.

The Problem

The error log of Percona XtraDB Cluster (8.0) had the following information:

2025-11-05T05:26:10.982984Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-000059]   [Server] SSL error: Unable to get certificate from '/var/lib/mysql/server-cert.pem'.
2025-11-05T05:26:10.983030Z 0 [Warning] [MY-013595] [Server] Failed to initialize TLS for channel: mysql_main. See below for the description of exact issue. …

Having a separate DR cluster for production databases is a modern day requirement or necessity for tech and other related businesses that rely heavily on their database systems. Setting up such a [DC -> DR] topology for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), which is a virtually- synchronous cluster, can be a bit challenging in a complex Kubernetes environment.

Here, Percona Operator for MySQL comes in handy, with a minimal number of steps to configure such a topology, which ensures a remote side backup or a disaster recovery solution.

So without taking much time, let’s see how the overall setup and configurations look from a practical standpoint.

PXC Cross-Site/Disaster Recovery

DC Configuration

1) Here we have a three-node PXC cluster running on the DC side.

shell> kubectl get pods -n pxc
NAME                                               READY   STATUS …

My colleague Miguel wrote about ways to audit login attempts in MySQL over 13 years ago, and this is still a relevant subject. I decided to refresh this topic to include some important changes since then.

Very often, it is important to track login attempts to our databases due to security reasons as well as to catch application misconfigurations. I’ll focus here on the most convenient ways to log authentication attempts. While auditing all client connections is usually pointless on busy production systems, when even thousands of new client sessions may be authenticating per second, let’s concentrate especially on the failed ones.

The Error Log

All MySQL and MariaDB variants have an easy way of logging failed authentication attempts in the standard error log via elevated log verbosity. To enable it, in older MySQL versions up …

When a replica fails due to corruption or drift, the standard solution is to rebuild it from a fresh copy of the master when pt-table-sync is not an option. Traditionally, when we need to build a new replica, we use a physical backup for speed, but there are some cases where you still need logical backups. For instance, when you migrate to a specific vendor (i.e.: MariaDB to MySQL) or storage engines (in the past MyISAM to InnoDB and nowadays from InnoDB to RocksDB), upgrade to a new database version or move to a cloud based solution. This is where a logical backup shines, offering portability and simplicity, but only if it can be performed quickly. MyDumper emerges as the essential, modern solution, delivering the best of both worlds: the cross-platform, cross-version flexibility of a logical dump combined with the parallel, multi-threaded speed previously reserved for physical methods, making it the clear choice for rapidly rebuilding a consistent …

For decades, we’ve accepted a painful compromise: if you wanted logic inside the database, you had to write SQL/PSM (Persistent Stored Modules). It’s clunky, hard to debug, and declarative by nature, making it terrible for algorithmic tasks. That ends with Percona Server 8.4.7-7. We are introducing JS Stored Programs as a Tech Preview. Unlike Oracle’s […]

A unique constraint specifies, one or more columns as unique it identifies. It is satisfied only when no two rows store the same non-null values at its core. A primary key constraint is a unique one that will say PRIMARY KEY in its defined way. It is satisfied only when rows unfold, and none may […]

At Percona, our mission has always been to help you succeed with open source databases. We do that by listening to the community, understanding the challenges you face, and building the solutions you need. Now, after a comprehensive review of market trends and direct feedback from our customers and the MySQL community, we are excited […]