MySQL 8.0.31 added INTERSECT and EXCEPT to augment the long-lived UNION operator. That is the good news. The bad news is that you have to be careful using the EXCEPT operator as there is a trick.

Let’s start with some simple tables and load some simple data.

SQL > create table a (id int, nbr int);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.0180 sec)
SQL > create table b (id int, nbr int);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.0199 sec)
SQL > insert into a (id,nbr) values (1,10),(3,30),(5,50),(7,70);
Query OK, 4 rows affected (0.0076 sec)

Records: 4  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
SQL > insert into b (id,nbr) values (1,10),(2,20),(3,30),(4,40);
Query OK, 4 rows affected (0.0159 sec)

Records: 4  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

So each table has four rows of data with two rows – (1,10) and (3,30) – appearing in both.

SQL > select id,nbr from a;
+----+-----+
| id | nbr |
+----+-----+
|  1 |  10 |
|  3 |  30 |
|  5 |  50 |
|  7 |  70 | …

Not long ago, we found a long-running query in one of our clients on Managed Services. While reviewing this long-running query, we found it was generated by a pt-archiver operation. That doesn’t sound good, right?

I was able to reproduce the issue on my test environment. In this article, I will show you how to use pt-archiver to purge data from a table using a secondary index. First, we need to have the full picture before going any deeper. Here is a representation of the table structure:

Create Table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest1` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `k` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `k_1` (`k`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=4000001 DEFAULT …

MySQL is an outstanding database for online transaction processing. With suitable hardware, it is easy to execute more than 1M queries per second and handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. Many of the most demanding web applications on the planet are built on MySQL. With capabilities like that, why would MySQL users need anything else?  

Well, analytic queries for starters. Analytic queries answer important business questions like finding the number of unique visitors to a website over time or figuring out how to increase online purchases. They scan large volumes of data and compute aggregates, including sums, averages, and much more complex …

As we have Kubernetes installed in part one (see Using Percona Kubernetes Operators With K3s Part 1: Installation), now we will install Percona Server for MySQL Operator into the running cluster.

I will copy some ideas from Peter’s Minukube tutorial (see Exploring MySQL on Kubernetes with Minkube).

In this case, I will use not Percona XtraDB Cluster Operator but a regular Percona Server for MySQL with Asynchronous replication.

We have recently released version 0.3.0 and it is still in the technical preview state, so we are actively looking for more feedback!

If we go with all …

The microservice architecture is not a new pattern but has become very popular lately for mainly two reasons: cloud computing and containers. That combo helped increase adoption by tackling the two main concerns on every infrastructure: Cost reduction and infrastructure management.

However, all that beauty hides a dark truth:

The hardest part of microservices is the data layer

And that is especially true when it comes to classic relational databases like MySQL. Let’s figure out why that is.

MySQL and the microservice

Following the same two pillars of microservices (cloud computing and containers), what can one do with that in the MySQL space? What do cloud computing and containers bring to the table?

Cloud computing

The magic of the cloud is that it allows you to be cost savvy by letting you easily SCALE UP/SCALE DOWN the size of your instances. No more wasted money on …

We are looking to provide simplified ways to deploy Percona software in cloud environments, especially for more advanced scenarios like replication and multi-node cluster (in the case of Percona XtraDB Cluster).

For this I propose trying out our new Terraform provider, with the capabilities:

• Deploy in AWS or GCP Cloud. The provider will automatically create instances and deploy Percona Server for MySQL
• Deploy either Percona Server for MySQL or Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Choose instance size
• Choose storage volume size, type, and IOPs
• Multi-node async replication or multi-node Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Customize MySQL configuration file
• Capability to deploy MyRocks …

In a post written earlier this year – Percona Server for MySQL Encryption Options and Choices –  I discussed some of the options around encryption in MySQL.  Being such a complex topic, that post was meant to clarify and highlight various aspects of “encryption” at different levels.  I recently had this topic come up again, but specifically around column-level encryption and various options so I wanted to touch on this in more detail.

As of the current release of Percona Server for MySQL, there is no built-in way to define a single column as encrypted.  Ideally, there could be some metadata passed in a create statement and this would just automatically happen, such as this:

CREATE TABLE pii_data ( …

This article outlines the basic configurations for setting up and deploying Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 (PXC) on Amazon EC2, as well as what is new in the setup compared to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.

What is Percona XtraDB Cluster an ideal fit for?

Percona XtraDB Cluster is a cost-effective, high-performance clustering solution for mission-critical data. It combines all the improvements, and functionality found in MySQL 8 with Percona Server for MySQL‘s Enterprise features and Percona’s upgraded Galera library.

A Percona XtraDB Cluster environment is an ideal fit for applications requiring 5-9s uptime with high read …

In my previous blog post, ProcFS UDF: A Different Approach to Agentless Operating System Observability in Your Database, I wrote about the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin, which allows you to get operating systems stats, through the MySQL database, without having shell access to the server and any local agent installation.

Some of you wondered whether there is a way to use this goodness in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), and this blog post will show you exactly how to do that.

Unfortunately, at this point, Percona Monitoring and Management does not support the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin out of the box. It is in the backlog, along with many other cool things. However, …

You have your database instance deployed with AWS and you are using AWS RDS for MySQL. All work smoothly in terms of satisfying queries for your application and delivering reliable uptime and performance. Now you need to take care of your backup strategy. Business is defined to have this retention policy:

• 7 daily full backups
• 4 weekly backups
• 12 monthly backups

Plus the ability to do point-in-time recovery (PITR) for the last 24 hours since the last full backup was taken.

The cloud vendor solution

This is a piece of cake. The daily backups: just set the backup retention period to six days. Done. This also has the plus that PITR is already covered since RDS uploads the transaction logs to S3 every five minutes and stores them in the parquet format, making it smaller than the regular text file. All amazing, right?

Now, the weekly and …