Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution for system monitoring. Sometimes, though, you’ll have the need for a metric that’s not present in the list of node_exporter metrics out of the box. In this post, we introduce a simple method and show how to extend the list of available metrics without modifying the node_exporter code. It’s based on the textfile collector.

Enable the textfile collector in pmm-client

This collector is not enabled by default in the latest version of pmm-client. So, first let’s enable the textfile collector.

# pmm-admin rm linux:metrics
OK, removed system pmm-client-hostname from monitoring.
# pmm-admin …

Protecting the data stored in your database may have been at the top of your priorities recently, especially with the changes that were introduced earlier this year with GDPR.

There are a number of ways to protect this data, which until not so long ago would have meant either using an encrypted filesystem (e.g. LUKS), or encrypting the data before it is stored in the database (e.g. AES_ENCRYPT or other abstraction within the application). A few years ago, the options started to change, as Alexander Rubin discussed in …

In this post I’ll give to you the steps to compile Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.22 in Raspberry Pi 3. Why? Well because in general this little computer is cheap, has low power consumption, and is great to use as a test machine for developers.

By default Raspbian OS includes very few versions of MySQL to install

$ apt-cache search mysql | grep server
...
mariadb-server-10.0 - MariaDB database server binaries
mariadb-server-10.1 - MariaDB database server binaries
mariadb-server-core-10.0 - MariaDB database core server files
mariadb-server-core-10.1 - MariaDB database core server files
mysql-server - MySQL database server binaries and system database setup [transitional] (5.5)
...

If you want to install MySQL or MariaDB on an ARM architecture using official pre-built binaries, you are limited to those distributions and versions.

…

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents MySQL vs MongoDB – Choosing the Right Technology for Your Application on Thursday, August 23, 2018, at 10:30 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 1:30 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

Are you considering to adopt the most popular open source relational database or the most popular open source NoSQL database? Which one is right for your particular application?

In this presentation, we will look into advantages and disadvantages of both and examine the applications where MySQL or MongoDB are the most appropriate choice.

…

Percona announces the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.41-84.1 on August 17, 2018 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). This release merges changes of MySQL 5.6.41, including all the bug fixes in it. Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.41-84.1 is now the current GA release in the 5.6 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• A simple SELECT query on a table with CHARSET=euckr COLLATE=euckr_bin could return different results each time it was executed. Bug fixed  …

Percona announces the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.61-38.13 on August 17, 2018 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). This release merges changes of MySQL 5.5.61, including all the bug fixes in it. Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.61-38.13 is now the current GA release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• The --innodb-optimize-keys option of the mysqldump utility fails when a column name is used as a prefix of a …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) 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.

The most significant feature in this release is Prometheus 2, however we also packed a lot of visual changes into release 1.13:

• Prometheus 2 – Consumes less resources, and Dashboards load faster!
• New Dashboard: Network Overview – New dashboard for all things IPv4!
• New Dashboard: NUMA Overview – New Dashboard! …

If you’re reading consumer SSD reviews and using them to estimate SSD performance under database workloads, you’d better stop. Databases are not your typical consumer applications and they do not use IO in the same way.

Let’s look, for example, at this excellent AnandTech review of Samsung 960 Pro –  a consumer NVMe device that I happen to have in my test lab.

The summary table is actually great, showing the performance both at Queue Depth 1 (single threaded) as well as Queue Depth 32 – a pretty heavy concurrent load.

Even at QD1 we see 50K (4K) writes per second, which should be enough for pretty serious database workloads.

In reality, though, you might be in for some disappointing surprises. While “normal” buffered IO is indeed quite fast, this drive really hates fsync() calls, with a single thread …

Recently, Dimitri published the results of measuring MySQL 8.0 on Intel Optane storage device. In this blog post, I wanted to look at this in more detail and explore the performance of MySQL 8, MySQL 5.7 and Percona Server for MySQL using a similar set up. The Intel Optane is a very capable device, so I was puzzled that Dimitri chose MySQL options that are either not safe or not recommended for production workloads.

Since we have an Intel Optane in our labs, I wanted to run a similar benchmark, but using settings that we would recommend our customers to use, namely:

• use innodb_checksum
• use innodb_doublewrite
• use binary logs with sync_binlog=1
• enable (by default) Performance …

Ever since AMD released their EPYC CPU for servers I wanted to test it, but I did not have the opportunity until recently, when Packet.net started offering bare metal servers for a reasonable price. So I started a couple of instances to test Percona Server for MySQL under this CPU. In this benchmark, I discovered some interesting discrepancies in performance between  AMD and Intel CPUs when running under systemd .

The set up

To test CPU performance, I used a read-only in-memory sysbench OLTP benchmark, as it burns CPU cycles and no IO is performed by Percona Server.

For this benchmark I used Packet.net c2.medium.x86 instances powered by AMD EPYC …