One question that surfaces regularly in the Percona forums: Does every node in a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) need to have XtraBackup installed? It's a fair question, especially when managing a mixed environment or trying to minimize the software footprint on certain nodes. Here is what the actual mechanics and testing confirm.

The Short Answer (But Read On)

It depends on what you want that node to do. The nuance matters quite a bit here, so it is worth walking through how State Snapshot Transfer (SST) works in PXC and why XtraBackup's presence — or absence — on a given node is significant.

A Quick Refresher on SST in PXC

When a new node joins a Percona XtraDB Cluster, or when an existing node has been down long enough that Incremental State Transfer (IST) is no longer possible, the cluster performs a State Snapshot Transfer (SST). This is essentially a full data …

This post covers a hands-on walkthrough of MySQL 8.0's JSON functions. JSON support has been in MySQL since 5.7, but 8.0 added a meaningful set of improvements — better indexing strategies, new functions, and multi-valued indexes — that make working with JSON data considerably more practical. The following documents several of the most commonly needed patterns, including EXPLAIN output and performance observations worth knowing about.

This isn't a "JSON vs. relational" debate post. If you're storing JSON in MySQL, you probably already have your reasons. The goal here is to make sure you're using the available tooling effectively.

Environment

mysql> SELECT @@version, @@version_comment\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
        @@version: 8.0.36
@@version_comment: MySQL Community Server - GPL

Testing was done on a VM with 8GB RAM and …

I was browsing around the Internet (don’t remember what for) and I accidentally found one cool aspect of MariaDB. There is a feedback plugin and this short post is meant to encourage you to use it!

Ok, so what it does and why should you opt-in to be spied on It takes some information about your MariaDB server including it’s usage and it will send it to the MariaDB folks. It doesn’t send private data from your database. It sends stuff like what OS are you running, what version of various plugins, how did you tweaked the default settings and also how big and how busy is your server. Now a short list of why I turned this on:

• Why not? Doesn’t cost me anything, nothing from the data I send is secret.
• When I develop an …

Recently I had some time to do some clenaups/changes/updates in server:database repo regarding MySQL (and MariaDB). Nothing too big. Well actually, there are few little things that I want to talk about and that is the reason for this blog post, but still, nothing really important…

MySQL 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7

MySQL 5.6 is stable for some time already, so it’s time to put it in the action. So I sent the request to include it in Factory and therefore in openSUSE 13.1. There is off course a list of interesting stuff you might want to take a look at before you update. If you don’t want to update, you can install mysql-community-server_55 from …

openSUSE 12.3 is getting closer and closer and probably one of the last changes I pushed for MySQL was switching the default MySQL implementation. So in openSUSE 12.3 we will have MariaDB as a default.

If you are following what is going on in openSUSE in regards to MySQL, you probably already know, that we started shipping MariaDB together with openSUSE starting with version 11.3 back in 2010. It is now almost three years since we started providing it. There were some little issues on the way to resolve all conflicts and to make everything work nicely together. But I believe we polished everything and smoothed all rough edges. And now everything is working nice and fine, so it’s time to change something, isn’t it? So let’s take a look of …

If you are following news regarding openSUSE and MySQL, you probably already know, that we have both MySQL and MariaDB in openSUSE to allow users to choose what they want to use. And if these two options are not enough, we’ve got server:database repository with newest and greatest development versions of both and MySQL Cluster on to of that. I think all this is great and awesome, that we have all of that.

Now to the not so great part. Unfortunately I’m bare human, I have to eat, sleep and I have some work, some bugs that takes a lot more time that I expected, some school duties to take care of and of course openSUSE Conference to organize! So as a result of all that, I can’t polish MySQL and MariaDB as much I would love to. And on top of that, I’m not …

If you follow MySQL community at least as much as I do (browsing trough the planet from time to time), you know that some exciting milestones were reached both in Oracles MySQL and in MariaDB. And as I love bleeding edge software, you can try all these exciting things prepackaged in openSUSE

Oracles MySQL

Let’s start with news from guys at Oracle. Recently they released new MySQL Cluster 7.2. Yes 7.2 is GA now. And you can find a lot of exiting info online about how fast it is! If you don’t believe benchmarks done by others, try it by yourself! We have it in server:database repository for all supported openSUSE versions, SLE and …

There has been a lot going on in MySQL community and I didn’t blogged about MySQL for some time. So this is a small update regarding MySQL in openSUSE Build Service and in openSUSE in general. This post is intended to let you know what, where and in which version we’ve got in Build Service And as I recently dropped server:database:UNSTABLE repo, everything is now in server:database, so the where part is quite easy

MySQL Community Server

First, let’s take a look at MySQL Community Server provided by the open source company we all love – Oracle. There are several versions around. Which one is the right one for you? That question …

As I promised a week ago, I’m publishing results of my little MySQL survey. Question that people (including me) are probably the most interested in is what variant(s) of MySQL are people using. No big surprise is that the most used variant (89%) is MySQL Community Server from Oracle. It’s well known default, people know what to expect and administrators golden rule is don’t touch it if it works. And other variants build on top of it anyway.
Second place (20%) belong to MariaDB. That is answer I also kind of expected. MariaDB guys are verbose and visible. At least I saw much more people talking about MariaDB then about Percona. Part of it might be that they position themselves as kind of MySQL competitor. Oracle is big controversial company. Sometimes we hate them (they killed OpenOffice!), sometimes we love them …

In openSUSE we’ve got currently MySQL Community Server, MariaDB and MySQL Cluster. From all of these we have even multiple versions. Although these packages are different, they are quilte similar. So I’m handling them in a little bit special way.
When I was adding MariaDB I knew that packaging will be quite similar to the MySQL Community Server. So I took some parts of .spec file away into separate files so I can sync them easily and left only package dependent parts in .spec files. Later on, I created special git repository and few scripts to handle patches and patch sharing among these variants. And lately I automatized tre rest of the manual syncing I was diong. So today I want to present how do I do MySQL packaging today. And that is also some tutorial on how you can modify these packages easily or even create packages for other variants like Percona
Everything starts with …