Percona Monitoring and Management is a great open source database monitoring, observability, and management tool. Query analytics is one of the prominent features DBA uses actively to trace the incidents and query performance identification.

We all know and love the Query Analytics (QAN) dashboard… It’s the first place we look when an incident alert fires or when a developer asks, “Why is the app slow?” or “What was going on during the midnight production outage?”

But sometimes, the standard dashboards just don’t tell the whole story or maybe are not clear enough. QAN is great, but shouldn’t we have more? If you have PMM running, you already have a Ferrari engine under the hood: ClickHouse. Most of us just drive it in first gear using the default UI.

In this post, we are going to take the training wheels off. We will bypass the standard QAN interface and talk directly to the ClickHouse backend to …

Recently, we received an alert for one of our Managed Services customers indicating that the auto_increment value for the table was 80% of its maximum capacity. The column was INT UNSIGNED, which has a limit of 4,294,967,295.

At 80%, we have enough time to change it to BIGINT.…. Right? Let’s see.

So we used pt-online-schema-change to perform the alter.

It started running at a good pace but slowed over time.

Why?

Well, let’s look at the definition of the table:

mysql> show create table myschema.mytableG
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: mytable
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `mytable` (
  `id` int unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `long_column` …

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 …

Remember when Percona significantly improved query processing time by fixing the optimizer bug? I have described all the details in More Performant Query Processing in Percona Server for MySQL blog post. This time, we dug deeper into all the ideas from Enhanced for MySQL and based on our analysis, we proposed several new improvements. All the changes are available in Percona Server 8.0.43 and 8.4.6, and newer versions

Before discussing specific improvements, let me describe how we measured the kind of performance gain we achieved. The top-level approach is common for benchmarks: you need a baseline version and then compare your modified version to that baseline. At Percona, we have a dedicated environment for performance testing. …

Deploying databases on Kubernetes is getting easier every year. The part that still hurts is making deployments repeatable and predictable across clusters and environments, especially from Continuous Integration(CI) perspective. This is where PR-based automation helps; you can review a plan, validate changes, and only apply after approval, before anything touches your cluster.  If you’ve ever […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Percona Cloud Native team is happy to announce the general availability of the Percona Operator for MySQL, based on Percona Server for MySQL. This release introduces an additional Kubernetes-native approach to deploying and managing MySQL clusters with synchronous Group Replication, delivering the consistency required for organizations with business continuity needs. With this release, Percona […]

Data masking lets you hide sensitive fields (emails, credit-card numbers, job titles, etc.) while keeping data realistic for reporting, support, or testing. It is particularly useful when you collaborate with external entities and need to share your data for development reasons. You also need to protect your data and keep your customers’ privacy safe. Last […]

Right now, you’re probably hoping someone else will deal with this MySQL 8.0 end-of-life situation. Maybe your team can squeeze another few months out of it. Maybe Oracle will extend support. Maybe it won’t be as bad as everyone says. We get it.  You’ve got enough things going on without adding “major database upgrade” to […]