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. …

Introduction/TLDR:

We are considering changing EXPLAIN in Percona Server for MySQL to require less privileges for providing execution plans for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements (and possibly changing the behavior for EXPLAIN SELECT as well), to make it more convenient and safer to use with monitoring and query analysis tools. We would like to get feedback from the Community about the different approaches for achieving this.

The problem:

Running EXPLAIN is a great way to understand how complex SQL statements are executed. So it is natural that monitoring and query analysis tools utilize EXPLAIN for these purposes.

However, there is a problem for cases when INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements need to be explained. Running EXPLAIN for these statements, a read-only operation, requires the same privileges as running the original statements …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.30-22 introduces a new authentication plugin, named authentication_fido. With this new plugin, it is possible to perform multi-factor authentication using hardware keys, or single-factor passwordless authentication with the same keys. This new plugin is in technical preview.

The plugin works exactly the same as the MySQL Enterprise FIDO authentication plugin, which is documented in detail in the official MySQL documentation and in the Percona Server for MySQL documentation

To try …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.30-22 introduces several improvements for the LDAP plugin: SASL support, support for fallback servers, and support for LDAP-based authorization. All improvements are in technical preview.

A description of the existing plugin features and usage instructions are available in the earlier blog post introducing the LDAP simple plugin, and in the Percona Server for MySQL documentation.

SASL connections

We introduced a new plugin similar to the MySQL …

In this blog post, I will try to cover a few dump and data-loading utilities offered by MySQL Shell.

What is MySQL Shell?

It is a robust client and code editor for MySQL. In addition to having APIs for dealing with MySQL, MySQL Shell offers scripting capabilities for JavaScript and Python. It provides an AdminAPI to manage MySQL servers and create InnoDB Cluster and ReplicaSet deployments. It supports an X DevAPI to work on both SQL and NoSQL interfaces via the X Protocol. Finally, it provides utilities to make working with MySQL in Python and Javascript mode easier.

Now, let’s jump into some practical stuff and see what these tools offer us.

Dump Utility

In the dump utility, there are three tools: util.dumpInstance(), util.dumpSchemas(), and util.dumpTables () so let’s discuss them one by one. 

1.  “util.dumpInstance()” – This was introduced in MySQL Shell 8.0.21 and …

Raspberry PI is a small single-board computer (SBCs) developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. This tiny computer is extremely popular and widely used in many areas. Thanks to its size, low cost, and low energy requirements, it can be used to collect data in remote locations or from sensor devices. We often need to be able to store large amounts of data efficiently on these devices.

MyRocks is a MySQL engine that uses RocksDB to store data. It is space efficient and able to handle writes quite efficiently.

First things first

Building and installing Percona Server for MySQL with MyRocks engine enabled is easy but requires some time. It is essential to make sure that you have all the ingredients and meet all the requirements:

• Raspberry PI 3, 4, 400, or superior.
• SD Card with …

Are you familiar with the UNION statement for your SQL queries? Most likely, you are. It has been supported for a long time.

In case you are not familiar with UNION, don’t worry, I’m going to show you how it works with simple examples.

Considering “Set Theory”, other than the UNION, starting from the newly deployed MySQL Community 8.0.31, a couple of new clauses are available: INTERSECT and EXCEPT.

From now on you can rely on more powerful options to write your queries and deploy some Set Theory logic.

In this article, I’m going to present how the three options work.

The traditional UNION

UNION combines the results from two or multiple SELECT statements into a single result set. Let’s suppose you have two queries, A and B, they return the same number of columns with the same data types and you need to merge all rows from both queries into a single result set. You can …

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.29-21, we added one more patch that helps us to build server code on macOS. To be precise here, we still could do this even before this patch but only partially. Now it is possible to build RocksDB Storage Engine as well.

A word of disclaimer here, at the moment, by macOS we still understand macOS for Intel x86_64 architecture (the most recent ARM versions with Apple M1 / M2 processors are out of the scope of this blog post). Moreover, Percona does not provide …