Welcome to the first interview blog for the upcoming Percona Live 2018. Each post in this series highlights a Percona Live 2018 featured talk that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post highlights Bryana Knight, Platform Engineer at GitHub. Her talk is titled Scaling a High-Traffic Database: Moving Tables Across Clusters. Facing an immediate need to distribute load, GitHub came up with creative ways to move a significant amount of traffic off of their main MySQL cluster – with no user impact. In our conversation, we …

Percona has revealed the line-up of in-depth tutorials for the Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place April 23-25, 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. Secure your spot now with Advanced Registration prices (available until March 4, 2018). Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available.

Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference is the premier open source database event. The theme for the upcoming conference is “Championing Open Source Databases,” with a range of topics on …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Troubleshooting MySQL Crashes on January 25, 2018, at 10:00 am PST (UTC -8) / 1:00 pm EST (UTC -5).

Register Now

This webinar is for every MySQL user! In this talk, I won’t focus on how to analyze core files, read the source code or set breakpoints. Instead, I will focus on techniques that are available to anyone, even a novice.

Many tutorials, including my own, written based on Roel Van de Paar’s video, suggest how to create and analyze core files created at the time of a crash. While this …

In this blog post, we’ll look at the performance hit from the Spectre bug fix on Ubuntu.

Recently we measured the performance penalty from the Meltdown fix on Ubuntu servers. It turned out to be negligible.

Today, Ubuntu made a Spectre bug fix on Ubuntu available, shipped in kernel 4.4.0-112. As with the Meltdown fix, we measured the effect of this update. Unfortunately, we observed a major performance penalty on MySQL workloads with this new kernel.

Our benchmark used the following:

System:

• CPU:
  • 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz (Codename Haswell)
  • /proc/cpuinfo has 48 …

In this blog post, we’ll look at does the Meltdown fix affect performance for MySQL on bare metal servers.

Since the news about the Meltdown bug, there were a lot of reports on the performance hit from proposed fixes. We have looked at how the fix affects MySQL (Percona Server for MySQL) under a sysbench workload.

In this case, we used bare metal boxes with the following specifications:

• Two-socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz (in total 56 entries in /proc/cpuinfo)
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Memory: 256GB
• Storage: Samsung SM863 1.9TB SATA SSD
• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.20
• Kernel (vulnerable) 4.13.0-21
• Kernel (with Meltdown fix) 4.13.0-25

Please note, the current kernel for Ubuntu 16.04 contains only a Meltdown fix, …

Join Percona’s, CEO and Co-Founder, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Why We’re Excited About MySQL 8.0 on Wednesday, January 10, 2018, at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

Experience: Basic

Tags: Developer, DBAs, Operations, Executive, MySQL

There are many great new features in MySQL 8.0, but how exactly can they help your applications? This session takes a practical look at MySQL 8.0 features and improvements. It looks at the bugs, issues and limitations of previous MySQL versions and how MySQL 8.0 addresses them. It will also cover what you can do with MySQL 8.0 that you couldn’t before.

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In this post, we’ll look at how to improve queries using generated columns and ProxySQL instead of implementing a referenced table.

Developers and architects don’t always have the time or complete information to properly analyze and design a database. That is why we see tables with more fields than needed, or with incorrect types. The best solution is implementing a change in the database schema and/or application level. In this post, we’ll look at an example of generated columns (using a char field) instead of creating a referenced table, and how using generated columns and ProxySQL avoids changes at the application level.

For this example, I will be using the film table of the Sakila database (with some changes). The original film table had a language_id as tinyint, which refers to the language table:

As we close out the holiday season, let’s look at some data that tells us how to guarantee a successful Black Friday (from a database perspective).

There are certain peak times of the year where companies worldwide hold their breath in the hope that their databases do not become overloaded or unresponsive. A large percentage of yearly profits are achieved in a matter of hours during peak events. It is critical that the database environment remains online and responsive. According to a recent survey, users will not wait more than 2.5 seconds for a site to load before navigating elsewhere. Percona has partnered with many clients over the years to ensure success during these critical events. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the most responsive, stable open-source database environments in order to meet their business needs.

First Stop: Germany …

Do you need to get to grips with MySQL proxies? Or maybe you could do with discovering the latest developments and plans for Percona’s software?

Well, wait no more because …

on Wednesday November 15, 2017, we bring you a webinar double bill.

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents “The Proxy Wars – MySQL Router, ProxySQL, MariaDB MaxScale” at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Reflecting on his past experience with MySQL proxies, Colin will provide a short review of three open source solutions. He’ll run through a comparison of MySQL Router, MariaDB MaxScale and ProxySQL and talk about the reasons for using the right tool for an application.

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

We’re close to opening up the call for papers for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 and I expect this to happen next week. We also have a committee all lined up and ready to vote on submissions.

In other news, I’ve spent some time preparing for the Korean MySQL Power Group meetup to be held in Seoul this Saturday, 11 November 2017. This is a great opportunity for us to extend our reach in Asia. This meetup gathers together top DBAs from Internet companies that use MySQL and related technologies.

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant …