Welcome to another post in our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Daniel Lee, a software developer at Grafana. His tutorial is Visualize Your Data With Grafana. This presentation teaches you how to create dashboards and graphs in Grafana and how to use them to gain insight into the behavior of your systems. In our conversation, we discussed how data visualization could benefit your database …

In this post, we will discuss how to fix cardinality for InnoDB tables manually.

As a support engineer, I often see situations when the cardinality of a table is not correct. When InnoDB calculates the cardinality of an index, it does not scan the full table by default. Instead it looks at random pages, as determined by options innodb_stats_sample_pages, innodb_stats_transient_sample_pages and innodb_stats_persistent_sample_pages, or …

Keeping databases running consistently and continuously is crucial to many organizations. When your site or application fails to load because of problems with your databases, you risk losing revenues—especially a business with a high traffic site which is the main source of revenues. If it happens often enough, you’ll lose not only transactions but customers.

There are many reasons why a database system may be unavailable, or at least not consistently available. It could be straightforward problems with your databases, or it could be hardware limitations. There are several potentially weak components of a database system. It’s important to know where are the potential weak points and to have a clear sense of what’s required to maintain a highly available database system.

If this concept is moderately new to you, it may be overwhelming. However, please understand that it’s achievable and learnable. You can start by focusing …

Keeping databases running consistently and continuously is crucial to many organizations. When your site or application fails to load because of problems with your databases, you risk losing revenues—especially a business with a high traffic site which is the main source of revenues. If it happens often enough, you’ll lose not only transactions but customers.

There are many reasons why a database system may be unavailable, or at least not consistently available. It could be straightforward problems with your databases, or it could be hardware limitations. There are several potentially weak components of a database system. It’s important to know where are the potential weak points and to have a clear sense of what’s required to maintain a highly available database system.

If this concept is moderately new to you, it may be overwhelming. However, please understand that it’s achievable and learnable. You can start by focusing …

MySQL 8.0.1 introduces new features and improvements to replication. The next sections summarize some related to performance.

1. WL#9556 – Writeset-based dependency tracking on the master

Transaction writesets can now be used to evaluate which transactions are independent and can be executed in parallel on the binary log applier on the asynchronous slaves.…

From everyone at Percona and Percona Live 2017, we’d like to send a big thank you to all our sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees at this year’s conference.

This year’s conference was an outstanding success! The event brought the open source database community together, with a technical emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, RocksDB, time series, monitoring and other open source database technologies.

We will be posting tutorial and session presentation slides at the Percona Live site, and all of them should be available shortly. 

Highlights This Year:

• Informative tutorials on day one, including …

The new release of MySQL is packed with exciting features that help detecting and analyzing replication lag. In this post, you will be able to learn all about the new replication timestamps, the new useful information that is now reported by performance schema tables, and how delayed replication was improved.…

Working with our users at Bonanza earlier this week, we saw their team demonstrate a great example of how monitoring insights can lead to a relatively simple — but impactful —  MySQL system tweak. In this case, the adjustment Bonanza made resulted in huge improvements to their total query time.

By looking at the mysql.innodb.queued_queries metric in VividCortex, it became clear to Bonanza's team there was an issue within InnoDB that was preventing otherwise runnable threads from executing. Often, when queries begin to queue, it's indicative of a problem; it's a good idea to regularly look for states like queuing, pending, or waiting as signs of potential issues. In this case, the innodb_thread_concurrency parameter had been configured to 8. Once …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how Prophet can forecast metrics.

Facebook recently released a forecasting tool called Prophet. Prophet can forecast a particular metric in which we have an interest. It works by fitting time-series data to get a prediction of how that metric will look in the future.

For example, it could be used to:

• Predict how much HTTP traffic we will get, and scale accordingly when needed
• See if a particular feature of our application will have success or if its usage will decline
• Get an approximate date when our database server’s resources will be exhausted
• Forecast new customer’s sign up and resize the staff accordingly
• See what next year’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday will look like, and if we have the resources to handle them
…

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 …