We usually receive and see some questions regarding the charset levels in MySQL, especially after the deprecation of utf8mb3 and the new default uf8mb4. If you understand how the charset works on MySQL but have some questions regarding this change, please check out Migrating to utf8mb4: Things to Consider by Sveta Smirnova.Some of the questions […]

Percona XtraBackup (PXB) version 8.0.28 supports taking backups for the encrypted tables in your MySQL database using the AWS Key Management Service. For setting up data-at-rest encryption using AWS key management service, please see Configuring Keyring for Encryption Using AWS Key Management Service in Percona Server for MySQL.In this blog post, we will discuss how […]

To be honest, the comparison between the two MySQL distributions is not something that excited me a lot. Mainly because from my MySQL memories, I knew that there is not a real difference between the two distributions when talking about the code base.To my knowledge the differences in the enterprise version are in the additional […]

In my previous article, Comparisons of Proxies for MySQL, I showed how MySQL Router was the lesser performing Proxy in the comparison. From that time to now, we had several MySQL releases and, of course, also some new MySQL Router ones.Most importantly, we also had MySQL Router going back to being a level 7 proxy […]

In this article, we will demonstrate how to achieve asynchronous replication automatic source failover when our replica is a Percona Server for MySQL (PS) and the source is a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) cluster, using virtual IP (VIP) managed by Keepalived.Let us consider our architecture below with async replication from PXC to Percona Server for […]

This blog was originally published in February 2017 and was updated in September 2023.

In this blog post, I provide an in-depth introduction to MySQL Replication, answering what it is, how it works, its benefits and challenges, as well as reviewing some of the MySQL replication concepts that are part of the MySQL environment (and Percona Server for MySQL specifically). I will finish by also clarifying some of the common misconceptions people have about replication and how Percona can help.

Since I’ve been working on the Solution Engineering team, I’ve noticed that – although information is plentiful – replication is often misunderstood or incompletely understood.

What is MySQL Replication?

MySQL replication is …

On July 18th, Oracle released its first pair of MySQL LTS and Innovation releases. (For more, check out A Quick Peek at MySQL 8.0.34 and MySQL 8.1.0.) These releases were announced several months ago and gradually detailed closer to the release date. Today, we know from Oracle’s official blog post what to expect, as well as what the cadence and scope of the upcoming releases will be.

So, the next immediate question that comes to mind is: Is Percona going to follow the same release pattern as “upstream“ MySQL?

The short answer is “yes.”

We are proud to say that over the last several years, Percona delivered on its promise of providing the MySQL community a …

This blog post was originally published in November 2017 and was updated in June 2023.

In this blog, we’ll provide a comparison between MariaDB vs. MySQL (including Percona Server for MySQL).

Introduction: MariaDB vs. MySQL

The goal of this blog post is to evaluate, at a higher level, MariaDB vs. MySQL vs. Percona Server for MySQL side-by-side to better inform the decision making process. It is largely an unofficial response to published comments from the MariaDB Corporation.

It is worth noting that Percona Server for MySQL is a drop-in compatible branch of MySQL, where Percona contributes as much as possible upstream. MariaDB Server, on the other hand, is a fork of MySQL 5.5. They cherry-picked MySQL features and don’t …

Historically MySQL is great in horizontal READ scale. The scaling, in that case, is offered by the different number of Replica nodes, no matter if using standard asynchronous replication or synchronous replication.

However, those solutions do not offer the same level of scaling for writes operation.

Why? Because the solutions still rely on writing in one single node that works as Primary. Also, in the case of multi-Primary, the writes will be distributed by transaction. In both cases, when using virtually-synchronous replication, the process will require certification from each node and local (by node) write; as such, the number of writes is NOT distributed across multiple nodes but duplicated.

The main reason behind this is that MySQL is a relational database system (RDBMS), and any data that is going to be written in it must respect the RDBMS …

Oracle’s MySQL 5.7 has had a good, long run, but the official End of Life is October of 2023. The Era of MySQL 5.x will be over, and only MySQL 8.0 will be officially supported. Yup, six months away. So if you are running MySQL, you need to consider upgrading to version 8.0 N-O-W!!

What does an upgrade provide?

MySQL 8.0 has many really cool features and improvements that are well worth the upgrade. The default character set of UTF8MB4 gives Unicode version 9.0 support. So you get the Umaluts, Cedils, and C-J-K Language support in your data, plus emojis. 8.0 is optimized around this character set. This gives you all the international characters you probably need to support global operations.

The Structured Query Language has been greatly enhanced. If you have trouble writing subqueries, you rejoice in lateral-derived joins and Common Table Expressions (CTEs). There is a new intersect clause to aid with sets. …