Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. One of the common questions that we get is “What is Multi-AZ and how it’s different from Read Replica, do I need both?”.  I have tried to answer this question in this blog post and it depends on your application needs. Are you looking for High Availability (HA), read scalability … or both?

Before we go to into detail, let me explain two common terms used with Amazon AWS.

Region – an AWS region is a separate geographical area like US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (London) etc. Each AWS Region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.

Availability Zone (AZ) – AZ is simply one or more data …

Serverless is a new buzzword in the database industry. Even though it gets tossed around often, there is some confusion about what it really means and how it really works. Serverless architectures rely on third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS) services. They can also include custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform. In comparison to traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) server architecture, where you pay a predetermined sum for your instances, serverless applications benefit from reduced costs of operations and lower complexity. They are also considered to be more agile, allowing for reduced engineering efforts.

In reality, there are still servers in a serverless architecture: they are just being used, managed, and maintained outside of the application. But isn’t that a lot like what cloud providers, such as Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are already …

The requirements for managing and running a database in a modern enterprise have evolved over the past ten years. Those in charge of running enterprise databases have seen their focus shift from ensuring access and availability, to architecture, design and scalability responsibilities. Web-first companies pioneered the change by charging site reliability engineers (SRE’s) or multi-faceted DBAs with the task of ensuring that the company’s main revenue engine not only stayed up, but could scale to wherever the business needed to go. This is a far cry from the classic enterprise DBA’s top responsibilities: keep it up, keep it backed up, and react to issues as they present themselves.

Today, enterprises look for new revenue models to keep up with a shifting technology paradigm driven by the cloud. The requirements and needs for managing their database environments are changing along with this shift. In the SaaS world, application outages …

In this blog post on Percona Live 2018 sessions, we’ll talk with Shuhoa Wu, Software Developer for Shopify, Inc. about how Ghostferry is the Swiss Army knife of live data migrations.

Existing tools like mysqldump and replication cannot migrate data between GTID-enabled MySQL and non-GTID-enabled MySQL – a common configuration across multiple cloud providers that cannot be changed. These tools are also cumbersome to operate and error-prone, thus requiring a DBA’s attention for each data migration. Shopify’s team introduced a tool that allows for easy migration of data between MySQL databases with constant downtime on the order of seconds.

Inspired by gh-ost, their tool is named Ghostferry and allows application developers at Shopify to migrate data without assistance …

In this blog post on Percona Live 2018 sessions, we’ll talk with Jun Su, Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft about how Microsoft built MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB for the cloud.

Offering MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB database services in the cloud is different than doing so on-premise. Latency, connection redirection, optimal performance configuration are just a few challenges. In this session, Jun Su walked us through Microsoft’s journey to not only offer these popular OSS RDBMS in Microsoft Azure, but how they are implemented in Azure as a true DBaaS. We learned about Microsoft’s Azure Database Services platform architecture, and how these services are built to scale.

In Azure, database engine instances are services managed by the Azure Service Fabric, which is a platform for …

In this Percona Live 2018 blog, we’ll talk with Ronald Francisco, SRE of Database Infrastructure at Twitter about why they moved from a fork of MySQL to MySQL 5.7.

We already started today with a great set of keynote sessions, and now the breakout sessions have begun in earnest. I’ve been looking in on the talks and stopping to talk with some of the presenters.

In this session, Ronald Ramon Francisco (Twitter Inc) SRE, Database Infrastructure presented the motivation for moving from a fork to MySQL to MySQL proper, and why they decided to do it. Twitter has been using their own fork of MySQL for many years. Last year the team decided to migrate to the community version of MySQL 5.7 and abandoned their own version. The road to the community version was full of challenges.

He also discussed the challenges and surprises encountered and how they overcome them. Finally, He looked at lessons learned, …

In this post, we’ll look at how to implement ProxySQL with AWS Aurora.

Recently, there have been a few discussions and customer requests that focused on AWS Aurora and how to make the various architectures and solutions more flexible.

Flexible how, you may ask? Well, there are the usual expectations:

• How do you improve resource utilization?
• How can I filter (or block) things?
• Can I shard with Aurora?
• What is the best way to implement query caching?
• … and more.

The inclusion of ProxySQL solves many of the points above. We in Consulting design the solutions for our customers by applying the different functionalities to better match customers needs. Whenever we deal …

In this blog post, we’ll look at what is needed when migrating MySQL users to Amazon RDS. We’ll discuss how we can transform MySQL user grants and make them compatible with Amazon RDS.

In order to deliver a managed service experience, Amazon RDS does not provide shell access to the underlying operating system. It also restricts access to certain procedures that require advanced privileges.

Every MySQL instance has some users with ALL PRIVILEGES, and you can’t directly migrate these users to Amazon RDS because it does not support following privileges for regular users.

• SUPER – Enable use of other administrative operations such as CHANGE MASTER TO, KILL, PURGE BINARY …

Please join Percona’s Build / Release Engineer, Mykola Marzhan, as he presents Monitoring Amazon RDS with Percona Monitoring and Management on February 27, 2018, at 7:00 am PST (UTC-8) / 10:00 am EST (UTC-5).

Register Now

Are you concerned about how you are monitoring your AWS environment? Keeping track of what is happening in your Amazon RDS deployment is key to guaranteeing the performance and availability of your database for …

The Aurora hash join feature for relational databases has been around for a while now. But unlike MySQL Block Nested Loop algorithm, an Aurora hash join only caters to a specific number of use cases. When implemented with the optimizer properly, they can provide great benefits with certain workloads. Below we’ll see a brief example of a quick win.

This new feature is available in Aurora lab mode version 1.16. Because this is a lab feature, it’s important to make sure to test your queries before upgrading, especially if you are looking to scale up to the new R4 instances before the Superbowl to avoid hitting the same problem I discuss below.

When lab mode is enabled and

hash_join

  is ON, you can verify the optimizer feature from the

optimizer_switch

 variable: