Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.23-14 was released last week and I wanted to take a minute to call out some of the interesting new features that we have introduced in this release. These are included in addition to the features and improvements in MySQL 8.0.23 that were introduced by the Oracle MySQL team (and to which Percona also contributed).

Hashicorp Vault Plugin Support for KV Secrets Engine – Version 2 (PS-5364)

As of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.23-14, the Hashicorp Vault plugin can be configured to specifically use either V1 or V2 Secrets Engine API or it can be configured to probe and auto-detect the best version to use.

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This blog post will show how to compile the Percona XtraBackup (PXB) tool for ARM. For this, we are going to use an AWS EC2 ARM instance with Ubuntu 20.04(Focal Fossa).

The motivation for this was born in my interest in the new generation of ARM processors and if this is a viable option for the future. Ideally, I do not recommend installing all the necessary packages to compile Xtrabackup in a production environment for security reasons. Still, you can have a “compiling” server for this purpose and then move the binaries around.

Machine Configuration

For this blog post, I picked a c6g.2xlarge instance. The machine has the following hardware configuration:

Multi-writer replication has been a challenge in the MySQL ecosystem for years before truly dedicated solutions were introduced – first Galera (and so Percona XtradDB Cluster (PXC)) replication (around 2011), and then Group Replication (first GA in 2016).

Now, with both multi-writer technologies available, do we still need traditional asynchronous replication, set up in active-active topology? Apparently yes, there are still valid use cases. And you may need it not only when for some reason Galera/PXC or GR are not suitable, but also when you actually use them. Of course, the most typical case is to have a second cluster in a different …

Apologies for the silly title, but the issue is a real one, even though it is not a new thing. Schema upgrades are not an ordinary operation in Galera. For the subject at hand, the bottom line is: under the default Total Order Isolation (TOI) method, “the cluster replicates the schema change query as a statement before its execution.” What this means in practice is that a DDL issued in one node is replicated to other nodes in the cluster before it is even executed in the source node, let alone completed successfully.

As a result of this, it may fail in one node and be successful in another, and this without raising loud alerts or stopping nodes to protect against data inconsistency. This is not a bug in itself but rather a compromise of design. With new changes in MySQL and the …

While I was working on my grFailOver POC, I have also done some additional parallel testing. One of them was to see how online DDL is executed inside a Group Replication cluster.

The online DDL feature provides support for instant and in-place table alterations and concurrent DML. Checking the Group Replication (GR) official documentation, I was trying to identify if any limitation exists, but the only thing I have found was this:

“Concurrent DDL versus DML Operations.  Concurrent data definition statements and data manipulation statements executing against the same object but on different servers is not supported when using multi-primary mode. During execution of Data Definition Language (DDL) statements on an object, executing concurrent Data Manipulation Language (DML) on the …

Where x is >= 22

The Problem

There are few things your data does not like. One is water and another is fire. Well, guess what:

If you think that everything will be fine after all, take a look:

Given my ISP had part of its management infrastructure on OVH, they had been impacted by the incident.

As you can see from the highlight, the ticket number in three years changes very little (2k cases) and the date jumps from 2018 to 2021. On top of that, I have to mention I had opened several tickets the month before that disappeared. 

So either my ISP was very lucky and had very few cases in three years and sent all my tickets to /dev/null… or they have lost THREE YEARS of data.   

Let us go straight to the chase; they have lost their …

This blog provides high availability (HA) guidelines using group replication architecture and deployment recommendations in MySQL, based on our best practices.

Every architecture and deployment depends on the customer requirements and application demands for high availability and the estimated level of usage. For example, using high read or high write applications, or both, with a need for 99.999% availability.

Here, we give architecture and deployment recommendations along with a technical overview for a solution that provides a high level of high availability and assumes the usage of high read/write applications (20k or more queries per second).

Layout

Components

This architecture is composed of two main layers:

• Connection and distribution layer
• RDBMS …

Chasing bugs can be a tedious task, and multi-threaded software doesn’t make it any easier. Threads will be scheduled at different times, instructions will not have deterministic results, and in order for one to reproduce a particular issue, it might require the exact same threads, doing the exact same work, at the exact same time. As you can imagine, this is not straightforward.

Let’s say your database is crashing or even having a transient stall.  By the time you get to it, the crash has happened and you are stuck restoring service quickly and doing after-the-fact forensics.  Wouldn’t it be nice to replay the work from right before or during the crash and see exactly what was happening?

Record and Replay is a technique where we record the execution of a program allowing it to be replayed over and over producing the same result. Engineers at …

So your MySQL server has crashed.  What do you do now?  When a server is down, in my opinion, there are two steps that are essential and both are extremely important and neither should be neglected:

1. Save diagnostic information for determining the root cause analysis (RCA).
2. Get the server back up and running.

Too many people rush to Step #2 and lose pertinent diagnostics from Step #1.  Likewise, too many people will spend too much time on Step #1 and delay getting to Step #2 and restoring service.  The goal is to collect diagnostics as quickly as possible for later review while getting service restored as fast as possible.

As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) and assisting on server restoration calls, I have seen both issues at play.  Technical resources have a tendency to get so bogged down in trying to understand the cause of the server outage that they …

As database footprints continue to explode, many companies are looking for ways to deal with such rapid growth.  One approach is to refactor traditional relational databases to fit into a NoSQL engine, where horizontal scalability is easier.  However, in many cases, this is in no way a trivial undertaking.

Another approach that has been gaining interest is the use of MyRocks as an alternative storage engine to the traditional InnoDB.  While not for everyone, in certain use cases it could be a potential solution.  As with so many things open source, the next standard questions are: which version should I use?  Any differences with the engine if I use MyRocks with MySQL 5.7 vs 8.0?

In this post, I wanted to touch on this and give some high-level thoughts on MyRocks when it comes to the version of MySQL.

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