The architecture of MySQL-powered applications is one of my favorite topics to talk about. It’s a very important topic because if you do not get the architecture right then you’re very likely to fail with your project – either from the standpoint of failing with performance, high availability or security requirements… or failing to deliver on time and at the planned cost.

It’s also a great topic because there is so much knowledge available these days about MySQL-powered applications. MySQL has been around for a rather long time compared with many other solutions – and now we know what architectures have enabled people to build successful MySQL-powered applications and grow them to hundreds of millions of users as well as what applications did not work out.

This level of maturity really allows us to essentially take “off-the-shelf” MySQL architectures that can be used to build very …

We recently open-sourced our percona-agent and if you check out the source code, you’ll find that it is written in the Go programming language (aka Golang). For those not up to speed, the percona-agent is a real-time client-side agent for Percona Cloud Tools.

Our requirements are quite demanding for our agents. This one is software that works on a real production server, so it must be fast, reliable, lightweight and easy to distribute. Surprisingly enough, binaries compiled by Go fit these characteristics.

There are of course alternatives that we considered. On the scripting side: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby et al. These are not necessarily fast, and the distribution is also interesting. We have enough experience with …

The recent WebScaleSQL announcement has made quite a splash in the MySQL community over the last few weeks, and with a good reason. The collaboration between the major MySQL-at-scale users to develop a single code branch that addresses the needs of, well, web scale, is going to benefit the whole community. But I feel that the majority of community opinions and comments to date have been based on the announcement itself and the organizational matters only. What we have been missing is an actual look at the code. What actual new features and bug-fixes are there? Let’s take a look.

At the same time, as Percona is also a developer of an enhanced MySQL replacement database server, it’s natural to …

While built-in replication has been a major cause for MySQL’s wide adoption, official tools to help DBAs manage replication topologies have typically been missing from the picture. The community has produced many good products to fill in this gap, but recently, Oracle has been filling it too with the addition of MySQL Utilities to the mix.

One part of the Utilities that has been generating interest recently is MySQL Fabric, and we will be discussing this project in an upcoming series of blog …

Finding bugs in MySQL is not only fun, it’s also something I have been doing the last four years of my life.

Whether you want to become the next Shane Bester (who is generally considered the most skilled MySQL bug hunter worldwide), or just want to prove you can outsmart some of the world’s best programmers, finding bugs in MySQL is a skill not reserved anymore to top QA engineers armed with a loads of scripts, expensive flash storage and top-range server hardware. Off course, for professionals that’s still the way to go, but now anyone with an average laptop and a standard HDD can have a lot of fun trying to find that elusive crash…

 If you follow this post carefully, you may well be able to find a nice crashing bug (or two) running RQG …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 introduces a new “log archiving” feature. Percona XtraBackup 2.1.5 supports “apply archived logs.” What does it mean and how it can be used?

Percona products propose three kinds of incremental backups. The first is full scan of data files and comparison the data with backup data to find some delta. This approach provides a history of changes and saves disk space by storing only data deltas. But the disadvantage is a full-data file scan that adds load to the disk subsystem. The second kind of incremental backup avoids extra disk load during data file scans.

The idea is in reading only changed data pages. The information about what specific pages were changed is provided by the server itself which …

I am very pleased to announce a new event in conjunction with the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this year: Open Source Appreciation Day on Monday, March 31st in the Santa Clara Convention Center! We are pleased to announce two separate groups holding events this year under this new umbrella. We are hosting an event called “OpenStack Today” for those interested in learning more about developments in the OpenStack world. CentOS is holding the “CentOS Dojo Santa Clara” …

On Wednesday I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as we had time for during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Does a JOIN operation between two tables always produce an “access table” on the rows of the first table of the join, or it is possible to define an index (COVERING INDEX) to avoid this access to the first table?

Yes, if your …

Mats Kindahl of Oracle is lead developer of MySQL Fabric

MySQL Fabric is an integrated framework for managing farms of MySQL servers with support for both high-availability and sharding. Its development has been spearheaded by Mats Kindahl, senior principal software developer in MySQL at Oracle.

Mats is leading the MySQL Scaling and High-Availability effort covering the newly released MySQL Fabric and the MySQL Applier for Hadoop. He is also the architect and implementer of several features (mostly replication features), including the row-based replication available in 5.1 and the binary log group commit available in MySQL 5.6. Before starting MySQL he earned a doctoral degree in the area of automated verification of distributed systems and worked with implementation of C and C++ compilers.

He’ll be presenting at next month’s …

Over the past few years, we’ve seen MySQL technology advance in leaps and bounds, especially when it comes to scalability. But by focusing on the internals of the storage engine for so long, MySQL has fallen behind regarding support for advanced SQL features.

SQLite, another popular open-source SQL database, just released version 3.8.3, including support for recursive SQL queries using the WITH RECURSIVE syntax, in compliance with SQL:1999.

Why is this significant? It means that MySQL is now the only widely-used SQL implementation that does not support recursive queries. Fifteen years after it was defined in the SQL standard, almost every other SQL database of note has supported this feature:

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