Percona announces the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.3.5 on July 8, 2016. Downloads are available from our download site or Percona Software Repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona XtraBackup drives down backup costs while providing unique features for MySQL backups.

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In this blog post, we’ll look at pipelining versus parallel query execution when using X Plugin for MySQL 5.7.

In my previous blog post, I showed how to use X Plugin for MySQL 5.7 for parallel query execution. The tricks I used to make it work:

• Partitioning by hash
• Open N connections to MySQL, where N = number of CPU cores

I had to do it manually (as well as to sort the result at the end) as X Plugin only supports “pipelining” (which only saves the round trip time) and does not “multiplex” connections …

Examples are a great way to learn new things. As many of you may or may not know we’ve added some new things to MySQL Server 5.7.12  and the ecosystem around it, extending it  to allow you to use the MySQL as a Document Store. Meeting the challenge meant expanding Developer Interfaces and Database tools.

• Addressing information with a both classic and modern data architectures
• For all types of data – structured, semi, and unstructured
• Empowering developers – Simpler, Faster, Flexible
• Leveraging latest NoSQL oriented tools/methods – JavaScript, Node.js, JSON, CRUD, Methods chaining, and more

From the developer side the MySQL Document Store new APIs by …

As an update to the previous announcement, please find below list of events where you can find either MySQL Community team or MySQL experts at.  Please find more details at each conference below.  New events are marked with NEW! Any update to already announced event is marked as UPDATE!:

• July 2016:
  • NEW! Debian Conference 2016, Cape Town, Africa (July 2-9, 2016) 
    • MySQL Community team is going to support this conference financially even without staffing. 
  • Open Source Conference Okinawa 2016, Japan (July 2, 2016)
    • As tradition we are going to actively participate at this OS event, this time in Okinawa, Japan. There will …

In this blog post, I discuss some of the insights needed when using Amazon RDS and pt-online-schema-change together.

The pt-online-schema-change tool runs DDL queries (ALTER) online so that the table is not locked for reads and writes. It is a commonly used tool by community users and customers. Using it on Amazon RDS requires knowing about some specific details. First, a high-level explanation of how the tool works.

This is an example from the documentation:

pt-online-schema-change --alter "ADD COLUMN c1 INT" D=sakila,t=actor

The tool runs an ALTER on the table “actor” from the database “sakila.” The alter adds a column named “c1” of type …

Recently I experimented with column-level privileges in MySQL. Column-level privileges are fairly straightforward, but given how infrequently they are used I think there are a few areas worth discussing.

Here are a few high-level observations:

• Users can execute INSERT and UPDATE statements that affect columns they don't have privileges on, as long as they rely on implicit defaults
• Since SQL is row-based, it doesn't make sense to support column-level DELETE privileges, thus only SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE are supported
• You can grant privileges on multiple columns in one GRANT statement or multiple GRANT statements, the results are cumulative

Read on for more details on each type of …

Building a docker image for MySQL is essential if you’d like to customize MySQL to suit your needs. The image can then be used to quickly start running MySQL containers, which can be operated individually. In our previous post, we covered the basics of running MySQL as container. For that purpose, we used the MySQL image from the official Docker repository. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to build your own MySQL image for Docker.

What is a container image?

A container requires an image to run. A container image is like a virtual machine template. It has all the required stuff to run the container. That includes operating system, software packages, drivers, configuration files and helper scripts packed in one bundle.

When running MySQL on a physical host, here is what you would normally do:

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It's usually a good practice to have two columns called date_created and date_updated in every table. One can always use it in application and it helps in debugging too as to when a record was created and last updated in various circumstances and contexts.




This responsibility can be given to MySQL to automatically assign current time values to these columns.

In MySQL 5.6 onwards, this can be done by setting the data type of the columns to be either date time or timestamp and creating date_created column with NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP  schema and date_updated column with NOT NULL DEFAULT …

Working with a client last week I noted in my analysis, “The mysql server was restarted on Thursday and so the [updated] my.cnf settings seems current”. This occurred between starting my analysis on Wednesday and delivering my findings on Friday.

# more /var/lib/mysql/ip-104-238-102-213.secureserver.net.err
160609 17:04:43 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Normal shutdown

The client however stated they did not restart MySQL and would not do that at 5pm which is still a high usage time of the production system. This is unfortunately not an uncommon finding, that a production system had an outage and that the client did not know about it and did not instigate this.

There are several common causes and the “DevOps” mindset for current production systems has made this worse.

• You have managed hosting and they perform software updates with/without your knowledge. I have for example worked with several Rackspace …

What is the difference between InnoDB locks and transaction isolation level? We’ll discuss it in this post.

Recently I received a question from a user about one of my earlier blog posts. Since it wasn’t sent as a comment, I will answer it here. The question:

> I am reading your article:
> https://www.percona.com/resources/technical-presentations/troubleshooting-locking-issues-percona-mysql-webinar

> Full table scan locks whole table.

> Some bad select (read) query can do full table scan on InnoDB, does it lock whole table please?

> My understanding was that SELECT (read) blocks another DML only in MyISAM.

To answer this question, we to need understand two different concepts: locking and …