Have you ever wondered what it takes to complete Percona Server for MySQL (PS), Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and Percona XtraBackup (PXB) releases? 

Let’s step back just a minute and talk about what Percona stands for. We believe we “stand on the shoulders of giants.” This means we respect our upstream sources and work to add value to the base products. Over time, new functionality is added. Much of this value-add was implemented on the 5.7 series and pulled forward to the 8.0 series. Each time we receive an upstream release, we must reapply these features to the release we receive. This process is what we call the Merge Process. …

Starting a long time ago, we wanted to reproduce workload in a non-production environment, and there were different attempts to achieve that goal (Query Playback is just one of them). But there is another point of view, where you need to write your own workload to do so.

Both Have Pros and Cons

Reproduce Workload:

Pros:

• Simple to implement
• Ready to go

Cons:

• Need to rebuild the environment each time

Custom Scripts:

Pros:

• Possible to have a more realistic workload
• You can reuse the environment
• You can use Sysbench that allows you to change …

Due to CVE-2020-29488, Percona XtraBackup is modifying how xbstream handles absolute paths to prevent malicious file injections. Like the tar archiving utility, the new behavior removes the leading ‘/’ character and references to the parent directory.

Fixes are available in Percona XtraBackup versions:

>= 2.4.22

>= 8.0.23-16.0

For example, ../../../d1/../d2/h.txt will be saved in the stream with the relative path ./d2/h.txt.

The updated function provides a warning when creating a stream with a file with an absolute path:

$ xbstream -c /tmp/data

xbstream: Removing leading '/' from member names

The function also will not extract …

Lately, the number of questions about how to build Percona software has been increased. More and more people try to add their own patches, add some modifications, and build software by themselves. But this raises the question of how to do this in the same way as Percona does, as sometimes the compiler flag can make a drastic impact on the final binary.

First of all, let’s talk about the stages of compiling software.

I would say that at the beginning you need to prepare the build environment, install all the needed dependencies, and so on. For each version, the dependency list would be different. How do you get the correct dependency list? You can get all build requirements from the spec file (on rpm-based systems) or from the control file( on deb-based systems).

The next stage is to get the source code of Percona …

Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) for MySQL databases is an important feature that is essential and covers common use cases, like a recovery to the latest possible transaction or roll-back the database to a specific date before some bad query was executed. Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) added support for PITR in version 1.7, and in this blog post we are going to look into the technical details and decisions we made to implement this feature.

Architecture Decisions Store Binary Logs on Object Storage

MySQL uses …

MySQL 5.6.51 is the last release of the MySQL 5.6 series. Oracle will no longer provide updates or security fixes for this version.

Following Percona’s Release Lifecycle policies, the Percona Server for MySQL 5.6 series has reached End of Life (EOL) as well, and we will no longer provide public builds for bugs and security fixes.

We recommend that you upgrade to MySQL 5.7 or Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, or for the latest features, MySQL 8.0 or Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.

Suppose you have not upgraded because you have off-the-shelf applications that also must be upgraded and require 5.6, or you have other …

Join Brian Walters and Brandon Fleisher for an interactive discussion around new service and software offerings coming from Percona.

Oracle has decided that MySQL 5.6 will reach its end of life in February 2021. This means there will be no more updates and, more importantly, no more security fixes for discovered vulnerabilities. Yikes! Did you know you have options? Did you know Percona can solve this problem? Tune in to find out how.

Choosing a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider can be a daunting challenge. Not ready to move to DBaaS in the public cloud? Or, are you constrained to on-prem deployment due to regulations or other market conditions? Tune-in to learn how Percona is bringing the benefits of simplified DBaaS deployment to the on-prem, private cloud, and hybrid datacenter.

This interactive webinar will be conducted in a roundtable forum style. Bring your interests, bring …

Hi and thanks to all who attended my webinar on Tuesday, January 26th titled Using PMM to Identify & Troubleshoot Problematic MySQL Queries!

Like we do after all our webinars, we compile the list of questions that were answered verbally and also those that were posed yet remained unanswered since we ran out of time during the broadcast.  Before we get to the questions, I wanted to make sure to include a link to the RED Method for MySQL Queries by Peter Zaitsev, Percona’s CEO:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/12470

Hi Michael, you suggested that table create and update times should be ignored. Surely these values come from information_schema.tables? Does that not reflect what I would see if I …

Percona XtraBackup 8.0.23 enables the “lock-ddl” option by default to ensure any DDL events do not corrupt the backups. Any DML events continue to occur, and only DDL events are blocked.

A DDL lock protects the definition of tables and views. With the “–lock-ddl” option disabled, Percona XtraBackup allows backups while concurrent DDL events continue to happen. These backups are invalid and fail at the Prepare stage. If DDL events have occurred without the backup user’s knowledge, they may be unaware the backup is corrupt.

MySQL 8.0 introduced “Lock Instance for Backup”. This backup lock is lightweight, and the performance for DML operations is almost the same with or without backup locks. This lock is not available in 5.7, because …

Large replication topologies are quite common nowadays, and this kind of architecture often requires a quick method to rebuild a replica from another server.

The Clone Plugin, available since MySQL 8.0.17, is a great feature that allows cloning databases out of the box. It is easy to rebuild a replica or to add new nodes to a cluster using the plugin. Before the release of the plugin, the best open-source alternative was Percona XtraBackup for MySQL Databases.

In this blog post, we compare both alternatives for cloning purposes. If you need to perform backups, Percona XtraBackup is a better tool as it supports compression and incremental backups, among other features not provided by the plugin. The plugin supports compression only for network transmission, not for storage.

But one of the plugin’s strong points is simplicity. …