Recently, AWS presented its own CPU on ARM architecture for server solutions.

It was Graviton. As a result, they update some lines of their EC2 instances with new postfix “g” (e.g. m6g.small, r5g.nano, etc.). In their review and presentation, AWS showed impressive results that it is faster in some benchmarks up to 20 percent. On the other hand, some reviewers said that Graviton does not show any significant results and, in some cases, showed fewer performance results than Intel.

We decided to investigate it and do our research regarding Graviton performance, comparing it with other CPUs (Intel and AMD) directly for MySQL.

Disclaimer

1. The test is designed to be CPU bound only, so we will use a read-only test and make sure there is no I/O activity during the test.
2. Tests were run  on m5.* (Intel) , m5a.* (AMD),  m6g.*(Graviton) EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region. (List of EC2 see …

Aurora has a salient feature “Parallel query“, Which will be more beneficial for analytical workload environments.

Before going to deep dive on this particular feature, let us understand the basis of Aurora.

Aurora Archiecture

Key feature

• The key feature of Aurora is simple data synchronisation among the nodes. The sync latency will be too low when compared to RDS because the synchronisation is happening on storage volumes among the nodes. Also all the server will available in different zone, even when a zone goes down we can able to maintain will other server present in other zone with auto failure.

• Auto healing volume, Each …

Problem Statement

Having backups of binary logs is fairly normal these days. The more recent binary logs are copied offsite, the better RPO (Recovery Point Objective) can be achieved. I was asked multiple times recently if something could be done to “stream” the binary logs to S3 as close to real-time as possible. Unfortunately, there is no readily available solution that would do that. Here, I show what can be done and also show a proof of concept implementation, which is not suitable for production use.

In this example, the instance has two binary log files (mysql-bin.000001 and mysql-bin.000002) already closed and mysql-bin.000003 being written. A trivial solution for backing up these binary log files would be to back up just the closed ones (the one that is not written). The default size of the binary log file is 1 GB. This means with this solution we would have a 1 GB binlog not backed up in the worst-case scenario. On …

Introduction

Sysbench is a tool to benchmark to test open source databases. We have integrated Sysbench into the RonDB installation. This makes it extremely easy to run benchmarks with RonDB. This paper will describe the use of these benchmarks in RonDB. These benchmarks were executed with 1 cluster connection per MySQL Server. This limited the scalability per MySQL Server to about 12 VCPUs. Since we executed those benchmarks we have increased the number of cluster connections per MySQL Server to 4 providing scalability to at least 32 VCPUs per MySQL Server.

As preparation to run those benchmarks we have created a RonDB cluster using the Hopsworks framework that is currently used to create …

Release of RonDB 21.04.0

RonDB is based on MySQL NDB Cluster optimised for use in modern cloud settings. Today we launch RonDB 21.04.0. In RonDB 21.04.0 we have integrated benchmark scripts to execute various benchmarks towards RonDB.

There are three ways of using RonDB. The first is using the managed version provided by Logical Clocks. This is currently available in AWS and is currently being developed to also support Azure. This is still in limited access mode. To access it contact Logical Clocks at the rondb.com website.

The second way is to use a script provided by Logical Clocks that automates the creation of VMs and the installation of the software components required by RonDB. These scripts are available to create RonDB clusters on Azure and GCP (Google Cloud). This script can be downloaded from nexus.hops.works/rondb-cloud-installer.sh.

Recently one of our customers ran into an issue, wherein a bad actor(code) from the application had made the wrong update to 16 M records of a critical table in the database, causing the entire production process to go down. The application Team was able to find the bad actor and block it, our Remote DBA was involved in the Data Recovery/Rollback.

Here I would like to discuss possible recovery methods for the above said scenario

Delayed Slave:

A simple and effective way to recover is by using a delayed slave, RDS started supporting this feature from version 5.6.40 and 5.7.22 i.e., you can induce a SQL thread delay-interval for applying the writes to a slave, detailed implementation is covered in our blog here. It’s …

When you work with AWS Aurora you have limited admin privileges. There are some different grants for MySQL including SELECT INTO S3 and LOAD FROM S3 that replace the loss of functionality to SELECT INTO OUTFILE and mysqldump/mysqlimport using a delimited format. While I know and use lambda capabilities, I have never executed anything with INVOKE LAMDBA directly from the database.

This week I found out about INVOKE COMPREHEND (had to look that product up), and …

There are several ways to deploy ProxySQL between your applications and the database servers. A common approach is to have a floating virtual IP (VIP) managed by keepalived as the application endpoint. The proxies have to be strategically provisioned to improve the resiliency of the solution (different hardware, network segments, etc,).

When we consider cloud environments, spreading instances across many availability zones (AZ) is considered a best practice, but that presents a problem regarding VIP handling.

Per definition, VPC subnets have to be created in a specific AZ, and subnet IP ranges can’t overlap with one another. An IP address cannot simply be moved to an instance on a different AZ, as it would end up in a subnet that doesn’t include it.

So in order to use the VIP method, we …

As mentioned in the AWS discussion forum back in October, Amazon has started the end of life (EOL) process for RDS MySQL version 5.5. What this means is:

• AWS will upgrade RDS instances to MySQL 5.7 starting February 9 2021 00:00 UTC during your next defined maintenance window, provided you have one.
• If you don’t have a maintenance window defined, RDS will automatically upgrade you on March 9 00:00 UTC and there is no opt-out.

As any seasoned administrator knows, upgrades can be painful and things might go wrong.

Risks

I think we can safely assume that the upgrade will be performed in-place, as it would be too complex and time-consuming otherwise. Since a direct upgrade from 5.5 to 5.7 is not supported, we need to go through 5.6 first. This means instances need to be restarted twice; first to go from …

Kubernetes operators are meant to simplify the deployment and management of applications. Our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster serves the purpose, but also provides users the flexibility to fine-tune their MySQL and proxy services configuration.

The document Changing MySQL Options describes how to provide custom

my.cnf

configuration to the operator. But what would happen if you made a mistake and specified the wrong parameter in the configuration?

Apply Configuration

I already deployed my Percona XtraDB Cluster and deliberately submitted the wrong

my.cnf

  configuration in

cr.yaml

 :

spec:
...
  pxc:
    configuration: …