Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2018.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had nearly 4 million visits to the blog in 2018: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2019.

As 2018 moves into 2019, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

When I attended AWS Re:Invent 2018, I saw there was a lot of attention from both customers and the AWS team on Amazon RDS Aurora Serverless. So I decided to take a deeper look at this technology, and write a series of blog posts on this topic.

In this first post of the series, you will learn about Amazon Aurora Serverless basics and use cases. In later posts, I will share benchmark results and in depth realization results.

What Amazon Aurora Serverless Is

A great source of information on this topic is How Amazon Aurora Serverless Works from the official AWS  documentation. In this article, you learn what Serverless deployment rather than provisional deployment means. Instead of specifying an instance …

In this Checklist for Success series, we will discuss reducing unknowns when hosting in the cloud using and migrating to Amazon Aurora. These tips might also apply to other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings.

Previous blogs in the migrating to Amazon Aurora series:

• Migrating to Amazon Aurora: Reduce the Unknowns
• Migrating to Amazon Aurora: Optimize for Binary Log Replication

The whole premise of a database as a service offering is that you do not need to worry about the operating the …

In this Checklist for Success series, we will discuss reducing unknowns when hosting in the cloud using and migrating to Amazon Aurora. These tips might also apply to other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings.

In our previous article, we discussed the importance of continuous query performance analysis, especially in Amazon Aurora where there is less diagnostic visibility compared to running on EC2 or on-premise. Aside from uptime though, we need a lot more from our data, and we definitely cannot isolate it in Aurora.

Next on our checklist is that at one point or another, we will need to use asynchronous replication. Amazon Aurora has an excellent reputation for absorbing intense amounts of …

Migrating to Amazon Aurora. Shutterstock.com

In this Checklist for Success series, we will discuss reducing unknowns when hosting in the cloud using and migrating to Amazon Aurora. These tips might also apply to other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings.

While DBaaS encapsulates a lot of the moving pieces, it also means relying on this approach for your long-term stability. This encapsulation is a two-edged sword that takes away your visibility into performance outside of the service layer.

Shine a Light on Bad Queries

Bad queries are one of the top offenders of downtime. Aurora doesn’t protect you against them. Performing a query review as part of a routine health check of your workload helps ensure that you do not miss looming issues. It also helps you predict the …

Recently, I’ve been working with a customer to evaluate the different cloud solutions for MySQL. In this post I am going to focus on maintenance windows and requirements, and what the different cloud platforms offer.

Why is this important at all?

Maintenance windows are required so that the cloud provider can do the necessary updates, patches, and changes to our setup. But there are many questions like:

• Is this going to impact our production traffic?
• Is this going to cause any downtime?
• How long does it take?
• Any way to avoid it?

Let’s discuss the three most popular cloud provider: AWS, Google, Microsoft. These three each have a MySQL based database service where we can compare the maintenance settings.

AWS

When you create an instance you can define your maintenance window. It’s a 30 minutes block when AWS can update and restart …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

I consider this to be the biggest news for the week: Alpha Build of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0. Experiment with it in a Docker container. It is missing column compression with dictionary support, native partitioning for TokuDB and MyRocks (excited to see that this is coming!), and encryption key rotation and scrubbing. All in, this should be a fun release to try, test, and also to file bugs for!

Database paradigms are changing, and it is interesting to see Cloudflare introducing Workers KV a key-value store, that is eventually consistent and highly distributed (at their global …

In this blog post we shall discuss how you can analyze slow query logs from Amazon Aurora for MySQL, (referred to as Amazon Aurora in the remaining blog). The tools and techniques explained here apply to the other MySQL compatible services available under Amazon Aurora. However, we’ll focus specially on analyzing slow logs from Amazon Aurora version 2 (MySQL 5.7 compatible) using pt-query-digest. We believe there is a bug in Aurora where it logs really big numbers for query execution and lock times for otherwise really fast queries.

So, the main steps we need are:

1. Enable slow query logging on your Amazon Aurora DB parameter group, apply the change when appropriate.
2. Download the slow log(s) that …

Please join Percona’s Senior Consultant, Jervin Real, as he presents Migrating to AWS Aurora: A Checklist for Success. The event will take place on Tuesday, September 11th, 2018, at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

In the last few weeks, we have shown you how to successfully migrate from on-premise MySQL installations to AWS Aurora. What comes next is how to successfully ensure that your Aurora cluster performs and operates as you expect it to.

While …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Beyond the MongoDB content that will be at Percona Live Europe 2018, there is also a bit of an agenda for MongoDB Europe 2018, happening on November 8 in London—a day after Percona Live in Frankfurt. I expect you’ll see a diverse set of MongoDB content at Percona Live.

The Percona Live Europe Call for Papers closes TODAY! (Friday August 17, 2018)

From Amazon, there have been some good MySQL changes. You now have access to …