The latest from the MySQL community

In this blog post, we’ll discuss services monitoring using probabilistic fault detection.

Let’s admit it, the task of monitoring services is one of the most difficult. It is time-consuming, error-prone and difficult to automate. The usual monitoring approach has been pretty straightforward in the last few years: setup a service like Nagios, or pay money to get a cloud-based monitoring tool. Then choose the metrics you are interested in and set the thresholds. This is a manual process that works when you have a small number of services and servers, and you know exactly how they behave and what you should monitor. These days, we have hundred of servers with thousands of services sending us millions of metrics. That is the first problem: the manual approach to configuration doesn’t work.

That is not the only problem. We know that no two servers perform the same because no two servers have exactly the …

Updated 2/10/2017

If you've been watching the evolution of database technologies over the past few years, you've seen how quickly JSON has quickly cemented its position in major database servers. Due to its use in the web front-end, JSON has overtaken XML in APIs, and it’s spread through all the layers in the stack one step at a time.

Most major databases supported XML in some fashion for a while, too, but developer uptake wasn’t universal. JSON adoption among developers is nearly universal today, however. (The king is dead, long live the king!) But how good is JSON support in the databases we know and love? We’ll do a comparison in this blog post.

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Take Percona’s blog poll on what database engine you are using to store time series data.

Time series data is some of the most actionable data available when it comes to analyzing trends and making predictions. Simply put, time series data is data that is indexed not just by value, but by time as well – allowing you to view value changes over time as they occur. Obvious uses include the stock market, web traffic, user behavior, etc.

With the increasing number of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), being able to track data over time is more and more important. With time series data, you can measure and make predictions on things like energy consumption, pH values, water consumption, data from environment-aware machines like smart cars, etc. The sensors used in IoT devices and systems generate huge …

In this blog post, I’ll look at the types of NVMe flash health information you can get from using the NVMe command line tools.

Checking SATA-based drive health is easy. Whether it’s an SSD or older spinning drive, you can use the

smartctl

 command to get a wealth of information about the device’s performance and health. As an example:

root@blinky:/var/lib/mysql# smartctl -A /dev/sda
smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-62-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   100   100   000 …

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 …

This blog post contains step-by-step instructions for setting up alerting in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) using Grafana.

As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, I get to speak with a lot of the early adopters of Percona’s new PMM software. One of the frequent feature requests from them was the need for alerts at certain MySQL and MongoDB thresholds. Percona’s philosophy on alerting is that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We integrated Consul, Grafana and Prometheus into PMM because they are fantastic, free and open-source products. PMM packages them together in an easy to deploy and maintain format.

With the release of Grafana 4.0 came Alerting! The Grafana team excitedly shared this feature with its users (including Percona). Percona quickly followed suit by …

This post discusses archiving MySQL and MongoDB data, and determining what, when and how to archive data.

Many people store infrequently used data. This data is taking up storage space and might make your database slower than it could be. Archiving data can be a huge benefit, both regarding the performance impact and storage savings.

Why archive?

One of the reasons for archiving data is freeing up space on your database volumes. You can store archived data on slower, less expensive storage devices, and current data on the faster database drives. Archiving old data makes backups and restores run faster since they need to process less data. Last, but by no means least, archiving data has the benefit of making your queries perform more efficiently since they do not need to process through old …

This blog discusses how to prepare your database for the new leap second coming in the new year.

At the end of this year, on December 31, 2016, a new leap second gets added. Many of us remember the huge problems this caused back in 2012. Some of our customers asked how they should prepare for this year’s event to avoid any unexpected problems.

It’s a little late, but I thought discussing the issue might still be useful.

The first thing is to make sure your systems avoid the issue with abnormally high CPU usage. This was an problem in 2012 due to a Linux kernel bug. After the leap second was added, CPU utilization sky-rocketed on many systems, taking down …

Take Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

While customers and users focus and interact with applications and websites, these are really just the tip of the iceberg for the whole end-to-end system that allows applications to run. The backend is what makes a website or application work. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. A backend operation can be a web application communicating with the server to make a change in a database stored on a server. Technologies like PHP, Ruby, Python, and others are the ones backend programmers use to make this communication work smoothly, allowing the customer to purchase his or her ticket with ease.

Backend programmers might not get a lot of credit, but they are the ones that design, …

This blog shows the results from Percona’s poll on what database technologies our readers use in their environment.

We design different databases for different scenarios. Using one database technology for every situation doesn’t make sense, and can lead to non-optimal solutions for common issues. Big data and IoT applications, high availability, secure backups, security, cloud vs. on-premises deployment: each have a set of requirements that might need a special technology. Relational, document-based, key-value, graphical, column family – there are many options for many problems. More and more, database environments combine more than one solution to address the various needs of an enterprise or application (known as polyglot persistence).

The following are the results of our poll on database …