Welcome to the third (and final) day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017, and the third (and final) set of Percona Live keynotes! The enthusiasm hasn’t waned here at Percona Live, and we had a full house on Thursday morning!

Day three of the conference kicked off with three keynotes talks, and ended with the Community Awards Ceremony:

Spinaltap: Airbnb’s Change Data Capture System

Xinyao Hu (AirBnB)

In this talk, Xinyao introduced Airbnb’s change data change system, Spinaltap. He briefly covered its design, and focused on various use cases inside Airbnb. These use cases covered both online …

In honor of the upcoming MariaDB M17 conference in New York City on April 11-12, we have enhanced Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Metrics Monitor with a new MariaDB Dashboard and multiple new graphs!

The Percona Monitoring and Management MariaDB Dashboard builds on the efforts of the MariaDB development team to instrument the Aria Storage Engine Status Variables related to Aria Pagecache and Aria Transaction Log activity, the tracking of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP), InnoDB Online DDL when using ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE, InnoDB Deadlocks …

In this blog post, I will discuss the solutions for monitoring databases (which includes alerting) I have worked with and recommended in the past to my clients. This survey will mostly focus on MySQL solutions. 

One of the most common issues I come across when working with clients is monitoring and alerting. Many times, companies will fall into one of these categories:

• No monitoring or alerting. This means they have no idea what’s going on in their environment whatsoever.
• Inadequate monitoring. Maybe people in this camp are using a platform that just tells them the database is up or connections are happening, but there is no insight into what the database is doing.
• Too much monitoring and alerting. Companies in this camp have tons of dashboards filled with graphs, and their inbox is full of alerts that get promptly ignored. This type of monitoring is just as useful as the first option. Alert …

This blog post contains step-by-step instructions for setting up alerting in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) using Grafana.

As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, I get to speak with a lot of the early adopters of Percona’s new PMM software. One of the frequent feature requests from them was the need for alerts at certain MySQL and MongoDB thresholds. Percona’s philosophy on alerting is that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We integrated Consul, Grafana and Prometheus into PMM because they are fantastic, free and open-source products. PMM packages them together in an easy to deploy and maintain format.

With the release of Grafana 4.0 came Alerting! The Grafana team excitedly shared this feature with its users (including Percona). Percona quickly followed suit by …

In this blog, I’ll look at the impact of swapping on MySQL performance. 

It’s common sense that when you’re running MySQL (or really any other DBMS) you don’t want to see any I/O in your swap space. Scaling the cache size (using

innodb_buffer_pool_size

 in MySQL’s case) is standard practice to make sure there is enough free memory so swapping isn’t needed.   

But what if you make some mistake or miscalculation, and swapping happens? How much does it really impact performance? This is exactly what I set out to investigate.

My test system has the following:

• 32GB of physical memory
• OS (and swap space) on a (pretty old) Intel 520 SSD device
• Database stored on Intel 750 NVMe storage

To simulate a worst case scenario, I’m using Uniform Sysbench Workload:

sysbench …

In this blog series, I will discuss common questions I receive as a database Solutions Engineer at Percona. In this role, I speak with a wide array of MySQL and MongoDB users responsible for both extremely large and complex environments to smaller single-server environments. Typically we are contacted when the customer is about to embark on an architecture migration or redesign, or they have performance issues in their production environment. The purpose of this blog is to put together a list of common questions I field while speaking with active MySQL and MongoDB users.

We are considering a migration to AWS. What solution is right for us: EC2, RDS, or Aurora?

We get this question a lot. Moving to AWS is a hot trend. Fellow Solution Engineer Rick Golba wrote …

In this blog I will provide answers to the questions and queries that some of you have raised during the webinar on Nov 17th.

I would like to say thank you to all of the audience who attended the talk on November 17, 2016. You can also check the recording and slides here.

Q. How is storage distribution done across the node?

A. Each node has independent storage and other resources. There is no sharing of resource. Only the write-sets are replicated.

Q. If write-set propagation fails in some manner is there any retry mechanism?

A. write-set are written to …

This blog post discusses an information script for the Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) tool.

In recent news, we announced the fresh-of-the-press Percona Monitoring and Management (or PMM for short) platform. Given the interaction of the different components that together make up PMM, I developed a script that helps provide you information about the status of your PMM installation.

You can use this script yourself, or one of our support might point you to this page to obtain the information they need to troubleshoot an issue you are experiencing.

You will likely want to execute this script once on the PMM …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.0.2 Beta on 28 July 2016.

Like prior versions, PMM is distributed through Docker Hub and is free to download. Full instructions for download and installation of the server and client are available in the documentation.

Notable changes to the tool include:

• Upgraded to Grafana 3.1.0.
• Upgraded to Prometheus 1.0.1.
• Set default metrics retention to 30 days.
• Eliminated port 9001. Now the container uses only one configurable port, 80 by default.
• Eliminated the need to specify ADDRESS variable …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.0.1 Beta on 10 June, 2016.

Like prior versions, PMM is distributed through Docker Hub and is free to download. Full instructions for download and installation of the server and client are available in the documentation.

Notable changes to the tool include:

• Grafana 3.0
• Replaced custom web server with NGINX
• Eliminated most of the ports for PMM server container (now only two – 9001 and configurable 80)
• Updated to the latest versions of …