In this post, we’ll use a blog poll to find out what operating system you use to run your production database servers.

As databases grow to meet more challenges and expanding application demands, they must try and get the maximum amount of performance out of available resources. How they work with an operating system can affect many variables, and help or hinder performance. The operating system you use for your database can impact consumable choices (such as hardware and memory). The operation system you use can also impact your choice of database engine as well (or vice versa).

Please let us know what operating system you use to run your database. For this poll, we’re asking which operating system you use to actually run your production database server (not the base operating system).

If you’re running …

I recently attended DevOpsDays Toronto 2017, my first proper DevOpsDaysTO event.  I had the pleasure of attending and being able to immerse myself in this openly collaborative and supportive culture of IT professionals.  The variety of considerations expressed for delivering software features in a rapidly, frequently and reliable release focused manner was really intriguing….but not without its own complexities.… Read More »

Welcome to the third (and final) day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017, and the third (and final) set of Percona Live keynotes! The enthusiasm hasn’t waned here at Percona Live, and we had a full house on Thursday morning!

Day three of the conference kicked off with three keynotes talks, and ended with the Community Awards Ceremony:

Spinaltap: Airbnb’s Change Data Capture System

Xinyao Hu (AirBnB)

In this talk, Xinyao introduced Airbnb’s change data change system, Spinaltap. He briefly covered its design, and focused on various use cases inside Airbnb. These use cases covered both online …

In the last post I shared the simple set of steps to configure a Group Replication setup using SQL commands, and a few in the configuration file too. Indeed, it can be simple.  But then there are times where there are more requirements and configurations need more attention. Maybe the OS environment we use for MySQL setups has never impacted us… Read More »

MySQL Cluster is a highly available, distributed, shared-nothing database with very interesting performance characteristics for some workloads. Among other features, it supports automatic sharding and allows us to bypass the SQL layer if we don’t need it, via the NDB API (which in my eyes, makes it one of the few transactional nosql databases out there).

In this post, I’ll describe how we can set up replication from MySQL Cluster into a standalone MySQL server using Innodb as the storage engine.

Introduction

There are a few reasons to set up replication between MySQL Cluster and a non-NDB based MySQL server. These reasons include (but are not limited to): the need …

So you’re interested in the “new” MySQL Group Replication feature but are concerned that configuring it is going to be difficult.  Let me soothe those concerns with this blog post.  Yes, the MySQL team has recently been discussing other methods to configure Group Replication using the RC release of MySQL Shell and how it can be used… Read More »

This blog post examines the recent MySQL® ransomware attacks, and what open source database security best practices could have prevented them.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that there has been an uptick in ransomware for MongoDB and Elasticsearch deployments. Recently, we’re seeing the same for MySQL.

Let’s look and see if this is MySQL’s fault.

Other Ransomware Targets

Let’s briefly touch on how Elasticsearch and MongoDB became easy targets…

Elasticsearch

…

Valeriy Kravchuk’s great recent post on using oprofile to profile MySQL mentioned how pt-stalk, the script from Percona Toolkit to capture diagnostics data based on a detected condition, currently does not support the new operf comand, and relies instead on the deprecated and soon to be removed, opcontrol.

Fortunately, in the Open Source world, we deal with these situations by contributing, and this seemed a simple enough change that I could get a PR ready quickly and reply …

Why do we sometimes want to keep duplicate indexes?

I’ve done dutiful DBA work in the past to identify and remove what are commonly called duplicate indexes. That is, those indexes that look like (a) and (a,b). The thought is that a query will utilize an index as easily on (a) as on (a,b), and removing (a) will save storage cost and write performance. I’ve had the experience, though, of removing (a) and seeing performance tank.

(As an aside, these are really redundant indexes. A duplicate index would be (a,b) and (a,b) by two different names – this can commonly be done by object relational mapping (ORM) or other automated schema creation tools. I’ll call (a) and (a,b) redundant indexes below.)

This test is on Percona Server 5.7.14 with the sys schema installed and performance schema enabled.

Given two tables with the same number of rows and …

When moving your MySQL instances to AWS, you would probably have to deal with this decision. This article will highlight some of the key factors that need to be considered in order to help you determine which is the most cost-effective solution for serving your data.

Introduction

RDS is based on EC2, so in this post I will focus on the benefits and disadvantages of using the former, versus migrating MySQL into user-managed EC2 instances.

The value of RDS resides in simplified provisioning and administration. Several of the most common maintenance tasks such as minor version upgrades, backups, and slave creation are automated and can be managed from the AWS console. On the other hand, RDS imposes some limitations to MySQL functionality so it could be offered “as a Service” while delivering a safe and consistent user experience. Within those limitations we can mention:

• Storage …