Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.1.0 on September 13, 2019.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced open-source command-line tools, developed and used by the Percona technical staff, that are engineered to perform a variety of MySQL®, MongoDB®, PostgreSQL® and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually. With over 1,000,000 downloads, Percona Toolkit supports Percona Server for MySQL, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Percona Server for MongoDB, and MongoDB.

Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source. You can download packages  …

In my roles as a DBA at various companies, I generally found the tooling to be quite lacking. Everything from metrics collection, alerting, backup management; they were either missing, incomplete or implemented poorly. DBA-Tools was born from a desire to build backup tools that supported my needs in smaller/non-cloud environments. As BASH is easily the most common shell available out there on systems running MySQL® or MariaDB®, it was an easy choice.

How DBA-Tools came to be

While rebuilding my home-lab two years ago, I decided I wanted some simple tools for my database environment. Being a fan of NOT re-inventing the wheel, I thought I would peruse GitHub and Gitlab to see what others have put together. Nothing I saw looked quite like what I wanted. They all hit one or more of the checkboxes I wanted, but never all of them.

My checklist when searching …

Late one evening, I was staring at one of our large MySQL installations and noticed the database was hovering around 7-10 run queue length (48 cores, ~500 gigs memory, fusionIO cards). I had been scratching my head on how to get more throughput from the database. This blog records the changes I made to tune performance in order to achieve a 300% better throughput in MySQL. I tested my theories on MySQL 5.6/Maria 10.1. While with 5.7 DBAs would turn to performance_schema for the supporting metrics, I hope that you find the process interesting nevertheless.

View from an Oracle RDBMS DBA…

For context, I came to MySQL from a background as an Oracle RDBMS DBA, and this informs my expectations. For this exercise, unlike with Oracle RDBMS, I had no access to view wait events so that I could see where my database was struggling. At least, no access in MySQL 5.6/Maria 10.1 without taking a performance hit by using …

Database Administration is a tough, often ungrateful job. Especially if you run a 24/7 business-critical MySQL or MariaDB deployment.

MySQL has proven to be a remarkably solid database which supports billions of dollars in revenue. On some level this very solidity creates a false sense of security. There are many things that can wrong at any given time, whether that is a change to your app, a bug in the database, hardware failure or just simply running out of disk space.

Percona recently conducted a poll: “What keeps you up at night?”

Not surprisingly, “Downtime/HA” is very high on the list.

While there are many challenging issues and tasks that a DBA must deal …

Data is an invaluable asset to any organisation and every data should not be viable to all DB users. I had a requirement from one of our Support client to hide (mask) a few columns to the end user. Those columns contains sensitive information like payment details and mobile numbers.

In this blog post I am going to explain the how data masking features in Maxscale can be benefitted in such use case.

Maxscale Masking

Masking filter was introduced on the Maxscale 2.1 version . Below is a simple scenario. The columns “name” and “mobile” from the table student has to be masked.

[root@labs7.mydbops.com ~]# maxscale --version                                                           MaxScale 2.3.6

#Table Structure 

mysql> show create table student\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: …

In the conclusion of our blog series, Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog), we explore features of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL that allow database administrators to proactively monitor and manage MySQL and MariaDB servers. If you missed it, feel free to read last week’s post on monitoring MySQL and MariaDB servers.

Fix Problems Proactively with Hundreds of Monitors

SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL includes hundreds of monitors that are designed to examine the configuration and security of MySQL and MariaDB servers automatically, identify problems and tuning opportunities, and provides database administrators with specific corrective actions.

Use Advisor Rules

The Advisor Rules feature is a set of best practices that enables database administrators to monitor MySQL …

In week 5 of our Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog) blog series, we detail MySQL and MariaDB monitoring features with SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL, including real-time monitoring and monitoring MySQL error logs. If you missed it, you can read our previous post on understanding database performance trends.

Fast Startup Time to Start Monitoring

Database administrators can start monitoring MySQL and MariaDB servers in less than a single minute. The unique architecture and low-footprint of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL enable database administrators to install and configure all of the components that are required for monitoring MySQL and MariaDB servers very quickly.

The fast startup time is in sharp contrast with other monitoring and advisory …

Next in our Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog) blog series, we discuss monitoring and understanding performance trends using visual analytics and the display dashboard of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL. If you missed it, you can read last week’s blog on identifying and analyzing problematic SQL queries.

View and Understand Trends By Analyzing Historical Data

Configure the time duration for storing the data collected by SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL. It stores the data in a high-performance database (that is, the embedded relational database management system SQLite). By analyzing historical data, quickly obtain answers to questions like:

• How many times and when did database servers go down during the last six months? Which …

It is July now, and summer is upon us. The team at Codership are busy making Galera Cluster 4 for MySQL, and we are just hot of the heels of celebrating the launch of Galera Cluster 4 with MariaDB Server 10.4. 

At the end of May, Galera Cluster had a booth and several talks at Percona Live Austin. This was the first time the event happened there, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The key takeaway from that event would be Seppo Jaakola’s talk titled: Galera Cluster New Features. It covered the then upcoming MariaDB Server 10.4 release with Galera Cluster 4, went in-depth into how streaming replication works …

In week 3 of our series, Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog), we discuss how to identify and analyze problematic SQL queries using SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL. If you missed it, feel free to read our previous post on Agentless Monitoring and Cloud Readiness.

Find Problematic SQL Queries

MySQL and MariaDB currently lack advanced tools for profiling SQL queries (such as SQL Profiler of Microsoft’ SQL Server). While other monitoring tools for MySQL and MariaDB provide monitoring and advisory information on various system metrics, they do not pinpoint the problematic SQL queries. No amount of hardware upgrades and tuning of the parameters in the database server configuration file ‘my.cnf’ and the database server initialization file …