This is the first of a two-part series on using the keyring_vault plugin with Percona Server for MySQL 5.7. The second part, Backing up Percona Server for MySQL with keyring_vault plugin enabled, walks through how to use Percona Xtrabackup to backup from this instance and restore to another server and set it up as a slave with keyring_vault plugin.

What is the keyring_vault plugin?

The keyring_vault is a plugin that allows the database to interface with a Hashicorp Vault server to store and secure encryption keys. The Vault server then acts as a centralized encryption key management solution which is critical for security and for compliance with various security standards.

Configuring Vault

Create SSL certificates to be used by Vault. You can use …

In my last post I compared data at-rest encryption features available for MySQL and MariaDB. As noted at the time, some of the features available for Percona Server for MySQL were in development, and the latest version (5.7.23) sees two of them released as ALPHA quality.

Encrypting the InnoDB system tablespace

The first of the new features is InnoDB system tablespace encryption via innodb_sys_tablespace_encrypt, which …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.12 on September 13, 2018.

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® 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®, Percona Server for MongoDB and MongoDB.

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

Percona announces the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.23-23 on September 12, 2018 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). This release merges changes of MySQL 5.7.23, including all the bug fixes in it. Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.23-23 is now the current GA release in the 5.7 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free.

New Features

• The max_binlog_files variable is deprecated, and the binlog_space_limit variable should be used …

Experimental Build of Percona XtraBackup 8.0 released

An experimental alpha version of Percona XtraBackup 8.0.1 is now available in the Percona experimental software repositories.

A few things to note about this release:

• We removed the deprecated innobackupex in this release
• Due to the new MySQL redo log and data dictionary formats the Percona XtraBackup 8.0.x versions will only be compatible with MySQL 8.0.x and the upcoming Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.x
• For experimental migrations from earlier database server versions, you will need to …

It’s 2018. Maybe now is the time to start migrating your network to IPv6, and your database infrastructure is a great place to start. Unfortunately, many legacy applications don’t offer the option to connect to MySQL directly over IPv6 (sometimes even if passing a hostname). We can work around this by using ProxySQL’s IPv6 support which was added in version 1.3. This will allow us to proxy incoming IPv4 connections to IPv6-only database servers.

Note that by default ProxySQL only listens on IPv4. We don’t recommended changing that until this bug is resolved. The bug causes ProxySQL to segfault frequently if listening on IPv6.

In this example I’ll use centos7-pxc57-1 as my database server. It’s running …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

We’re releasing hotfix 1.14.1 to address two issues found post-release of 1.14.0:

• PMM-2963: Upgrading to PMM 1.14.0 fails due to attempting to create already existing Dashboard
  • Our upgrade script incorrectly tried to create dashboards that already existed, and generating failure message:

            A folder or dashboard in the general folder with the …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.



We’ve included a plethora of visual improvements in this release, including:

• PostgreSQL Metrics Collection – Visualize PostgreSQL performance!
• Identify New Queries in Query Analytics
• New Dashboard: Compare System Parameters
• New Dashboard: PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA Wait Events Analysis
• Dashboard Updates – Advanced Data Exploration, MyRocks, TokuDB, InnoDB Metrics …

One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

Is increasing GP2 volumes size or increasing IOPS for IO1 volumes a valid method for scaling IO-Bound workloads? In this post I’ll focus on one question: how much can we improve performance if we use faster cloud volumes? This post is a continuance of previous cloud research posts:

• Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud
• Percona XtraDB Cluster on Amazon GP2 Volumes

To recap, in Amazon EC2 we can use gp2 and io1 volumes. gp2 performance can be scaled with size, i.e for gp2 volume size of 500GB we get 1500 iops; size 1000GB – 3000 iops; and for 3334GB – 10000 iops (maximal …