Last year, I made the first post in a small series, which aimed to highlight unique features of Percona Server for MySQL, by discussing binlog_space_limit option.

Today, I am going to discuss another important type of log available in MySQL that is enhanced in Percona Server for MySQL – the slow query log. The reason why I am doing this is that although this extension has existed since the very early times of versions 5.1 (over 10 years ago!), many people are still unaware of it, which I see from time to time when working with Support customers.

Default Slow Log Inadequacy

How many times have you been wondering why, whilst reviewing slow query logs, the very same query occasionally runs way slower than usual? There may be many reasons for that, but the standard slow …

One of the most common support tickets we get at Percona is the infamous “database is running slower” ticket.  While this can be caused by a multitude of factors, it is more often than not caused by a bad query.  While everyone always hopes to recover through some quick config tuning, the real fix is to identify and fix the problem query.  Sure, we can generally alleviate some pain by throwing more resources at the server.  But this is almost always a short term bandaid and not the proper fix.

With Percona Monitoring and Management

So how do we find the queries causing problems and fix them?  If you have Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) installed, the identification process is swift.  With the Query Analytics enabled (QAN) in PMM, you can simply look at the table …

Join Sveta Smirnova, MySQL Engineer at Percona, as she discusses modern solutions for modern database loads.

MySQL is famous for working well in high performing environments. This is the reason why it is the most popular backend for web applications. But our view of what to call high-performance changes over the cycles. Every year we get faster data transfer speed; more devices, connected to the Internet; more users and, as a result, more data.

The challenges MySQL developers have to solve are getting harder over time.

In this session, Sveta will show how use-case scenarios are changing over 25 years of MySQL history. She will show what did MySQL engineers do to keep the product up to date and cover topics such as handling a large number of active connections and high volumes of data as well as how the latest MySQL versions handle increased load better.

After attending this …

Usually, database people are familiar with table fragmentation with DELETE statements. Whenever doing a huge delete, in most cases, they are always rebuilding the table to reclaim the disk space. But, are you thinking only DELETEs can cause table fragmentation? (Answer: NO).

In this blog post, I am going to explain how table fragmentation is happening with the INSERT statement.

Before going into the topic, we need to know that with MySQL, there are two kinds of fragmentation:

• Fragmentation where some of the InnoDB pages are completely free inside the table.
• Fragmentation where some of the InnoDB pages are not completely filled (the page has some free space).

There are three major cases of table fragmentation with INSERTs :

• INSERT with ROLLBACK
• Failed INSERT statement
• Fragmentation with page-splits

…

A few days ago, a customer got in touch asking how they could use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to monitor the roles played by each node in an InnoDB cluster. More specifically, they wanted to check when one of the nodes changed its role from Primary to Secondary, or vice-versa. PMM allows for a high level of flexibility and customization through its support for custom queries, and we just have to be creative on how we approach the problem. In this post, we present the steps we did to test our solution, including the deployment of a 3-node InnoDB Cluster hosted in the same server (for testing) and a PMM 2 server, and connecting them together. Even though this has already been covered in other blog …

The RED Method (Rate, Errors, Duration) is one of the more popular performance monitoring approaches.  It is often applied to Monitoring Microservices though there is nothing that prevents it from being applied to databases like MySQL.

In Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) v2 we have all the required information stored in the ClickHouse database, and with the built-in ClickHouse datasource it is a matter of creating a dashboard to visualize the data.

While I was editing the dashboard, I added a few other panels, beyond what RED Method requires, in order to show some of the cool things you can do with Grafana + ClickHouse data source and …

Note: This webinar was originally scheduled for June 30, but has been moved to July 30.  If you click “Register Now” below, it will take you to the registration form for the new date. 

Join Peter Zaitsev, CEO at Percona, as he discusses database challenges and the concepts of open source and open core. Over the years, open source companies have tried to bring products to market and maximize their revenue streams.  To date, the most popular open source business model remains “Open Core”.  But is open core software still open source?  Or is it a freemium model designed to separate you from your money?  Not all companies follow the same processes, ethics, and rules when building and launching open source products.  Let’s talk about how the open core bait and switch works for many companies in the open source space.

Join this webinar to learn more about: …

In most cases, MySQL password instructions provide information on changing MySQL user passwords on the production system (e.g., reset root password without restart). It is even recommended to change passwords regularly for security reasons. But still, sometimes DBA duties on legacy systems offer surprises and you need to recover the original password for some old users.

There is no magic: as long as only hashes are stored and not the original passwords, the only way to recover the lost password is to brute force it from the known hash.

Note on Security and mysql-unsha1 Attack

Interestingly, if a hacker has access to password hash and can sniff mysql traffic, he doesn’t need to recover a plain text password from it. It doesn’t matter how strong the password and how strong the hashing …

Day-to-day database operation requires, from an administrator, deep knowledge of db internals and security issues, in particular things like SQL injections. In order to prevent such kind of an attack, we have included go-sql-driver into our code for secure placeholder escaping.

Unfortunately, not all cases are secured by the driver.

In case we are using the standard driver for working with MySQL, if we need to pass a variable to the database query, we use a placeholder “?” in order for the server to understand that it needs to process the incoming variable to avoid injection. It works fine with just regular SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE statements, but, unfortunately, MySQL server is not able to process all types of queries.

For example:

db.Exec("CREATE USER ?@? IDENTIFIED BY ?", name, host, pass)

This query will return an error from the …

Would you play a multiplayer game if you discovered other people are cheating? According to a survey by Irdeto, 60% of online games were negatively impacted by cheaters, and 77% of players said they would stop playing a multiplayer game if they think opponents are cheating. Player churn grows as cheating grows.

Stopping this is therefore essential if you want to build and develop your community, which is essential to success for today’s gaming companies. This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Yahav Biran, specialist solutions architect, gaming technologies at Amazon Web Services, and Yoav Eilat, Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, presented a talk and demonstration about anti-cheating tools in gaming based on using automation and machine learning (ML).

Yoav notes that while people might think of ML in terms of text or images, but: …