Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

There is still much going on when it comes to Meltdown/Spectre in our world. Percona’s Vadim Tkachenko and Alexey Stroganov recently published Does the Meltdown Fix Affect Performance for MySQL on Bare Metal?. You also want to read Mark Callaghan’s excellent work on this: Meltdown vs MySQL part 1: in-memory sysbench and a core i3 NUC, XFS, nobarrier and the 4.13 Linux kernel, …

In this blog post, we’ll look at ProxySQL firewalling (how to use ProxySQL as a firewall).

Not long ago we had an internal discussion about security, and how to enforce a stricter set of rules to prevent malicious acts and block other undesired queries. ProxySQL came up as a possible tool that could help us in achieving what we were looking for. Last year I wrote about how to use ProxySQL to stop a single query.

That approach may be good for few queries and as a temporary solution. But what can we do when we really want to use ProxySQL as an SQL-based firewall? And more importantly, how to do it right?

First of all, let us define what “right” can be in this context. …

High availability for MySQL has become increasingly relevant given the ever increasing rate of adoption and implementation. It’s no secret to anyone in the community that the popularity of MySQL has become noteworthy. I still remember my start with MySQL in the early 5.0 days and people told me that I may not want to consider wasting my time training on a database that didn’t have a large industry adoption, but look at where we are now! One of my favorite pages to cite when trying to exhibit this fact is the db-engines.com ranking trend page where we can see that MySQL is right up there and contending with enterprise products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

MySQL has gone from being part of the ever famous LAMP stack for users looking to set up their first website to seeing adoption from major technical players such as …

There are 3 pillars for a database architecture: Monitoring, Backup / Restore process, High Availability This blog post is about database High Availability; more precisely about one of the best combo of the moment : MySQL 5.7 Group Replication : the only native HA solution for MySQL, it's a Single/Multi-master update everywhere replication plugin for MySQL with built-in automatic distributed recovery, conflict detection and group membership. ProxySQL 1.4 : probably the best proxy for MySQL.

In this post, we’ll look at how to improve queries using generated columns and ProxySQL instead of implementing a referenced table.

Developers and architects don’t always have the time or complete information to properly analyze and design a database. That is why we see tables with more fields than needed, or with incorrect types. The best solution is implementing a change in the database schema and/or application level. In this post, we’ll look at an example of generated columns (using a char field) instead of creating a referenced table, and how using generated columns and ProxySQL avoids changes at the application level.

For this example, I will be using the film table of the Sakila database (with some changes). The original film table had a language_id as tinyint, which refers to the language table:

Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2017.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had over three and a half million visits to the blog in 2017: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2018.

As 2017 moves into 2018, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

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Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

The end of the year is upon us, and this column is being penned a little earlier than usual as I enjoy a quick bout of wrapping up for the year.

We’ve had a lot of things happen in the database world. It’s clear that open source is everywhere, the cloud is large, and we’ve seen a lot of interesting movements in our MySQL world, from the standpoint of corporate contributions too. GitHub continues to enhance Orchestrator, and gh-ost keeps on getting better; Facebook has ensured MyRocks is now mainstream in both MariaDB Server and Percona Server for MySQL distributions; Alibaba Cloud and Tencent have been contributing to make MariaDB Server better. …

Do you need to get to grips with MySQL proxies? Or maybe you could do with discovering the latest developments and plans for Percona’s software?

Well, wait no more because …

on Wednesday November 15, 2017, we bring you a webinar double bill.

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents “The Proxy Wars – MySQL Router, ProxySQL, MariaDB MaxScale” at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Reflecting on his past experience with MySQL proxies, Colin will provide a short review of three open source solutions. He’ll run through a comparison of MySQL Router, MariaDB MaxScale and ProxySQL and talk about the reasons for using the right tool for an application.

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Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Santa Clara, CA, call for papers. It will be open from now until December  22, 2017.

Our theme is “Championing Open Source Databases,” with topics of MySQL, MongoDB and other open source databases, including PostgreSQL, time series databases and RocksDB. Sessions tracks include Developers, Operations and Business/Case Studies.

We’re looking forward to your submissions! We want proposals that cover the many aspects and current trends of using open source databases, including design practices, application development, performance optimization, HA and clustering, cloud, containers and new technologies, as well as new and …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.19-29.22-3 on October 27, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

NOTE: You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.19-29.22-3 is now the current release, based on the following:

• …