You got yourself a Kubernetes cluster and are now testing our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster. Everything is working great and you decided that you want to increase the number of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) pods from the default 3, to let’s say, 5 pods.

It’s just a matter of running the following command:

kubectl patch pxc cluster1 --type='json' -p='[{"op": "replace", "path": "/spec/pxc/size", "value": 5 }]'

Good, you run the command without issues and now you will have 5 pxc pods! Right? Let’s check out how the pods are being replicated:

kubectl get pods | grep pxc
cluster1-pxc-0                                     1/1     Running   0          25m
cluster1-pxc-1                                     1/1     Running   0          23m
cluster1-pxc-2                                     1/1 …

ProxySQL Firewall Overview

ProxySQL’s flexible query rules engine has many uses, from Read/Write splitting, sharding and even creating firewall blacklist. This allows ProxySQL to be loved by both Performance and Security-minded engineers.

Starting in ProxySQL 2.0.9, ProxySQL has another Security feature: the Firewall Whitelist.

Modeled on MySQL Enterprise Firewall, this allows a security-conscious administrator to tune access to only allow certain queries.

Imagine a situation where your webapp gets hacked, which exposes your user’s database credentials.

If your webapp connects directly to the database, the malicious user can do what they want to your data with the same permissions your webapp has.

So perhaps they can’t just DROP TABLE because you’ve smartly removed DDL permissions …

Following on from our recent newsletter and the message from Eero Teerikorpi, Founder and CEO, in this blog I will set out the outline and plan for the work we are currently undertaking to make a number of changes within the terminology used in our product and communications.

Tags:  MySQL terminology replica primary source target tungsten clustering …

In any MySQL replication or migration, generally, we’ll skip the mysql database from the dump file. Since it has the current server’s settings, users, etc. So we should not create a mess on the target server with this source mysql database dump. But one downside of this approach is we’ll not get the users on the target MySQL server. Maybe you tried some approaches that are mentioned here. But whenever I don’t the credentials list during the migration and don’t have time to explore/install any tools likept-show-grants, then I’ll use this trick.

DISCLAIMER You should try this approach when you don’t any user credentials on the source DB. Take a backup of the MySQL database on the target DB side. Do this with …

Ever wanted to extend MySQL and add some feature you think it is missing?  With MySQL plugins, you can do exactly that.  One thing that has bothered me for several years is that you cannot easily retrieve system metrics from within MySQL.  Whether I am connecting via a remote connection or looking to add features to monitoring without the need for another interface with the server, I have wanted to retrieve system metrics without leaving the MySQL interface.

So, I started a Proof of Concept for this.  My goal was to get metrics such as RAM (total, used, free), system load, CPU utilization, disk utilization for the file system containing the datadir, and more.  My objective was to do this as efficiently within MySQL as possible.  For this, I chose to utilize standard C libraries in as few lines of code as possible without having to scrape system files or run commands to get the data.  The …

Why another article on this, Marco?

MySQL deadlocks is a topic covered many times, including here at Percona. I suggest you review the reference section at the end of this post for articles on how to identify deadlocks and from where they are generated.

So why another article?

The answer is that messages we receive like the following are still very common:

User (John): “Marco, our MySQL is having problems”
Marco: “Ok John what problems? Can you be a bit more specific?”
John: “Our log scraper is collecting that MySQL has a lot of errors”
Marco: “Ok can you share the MySQL log so I can review it?”
John: “Errors are in the application log, will share one application log”

Marco reviews the log and in it he finds:

“ERROR 1213 (40001): Deadlock found when trying to get lock;
try restarting transaction”

Marco’s reaction is: “Oh …

Oracle MySQL is in need of a columnar storage engine for analytics workloads.  A columnar engine (or column store) stores data vertically, that is, it stores all the data associated with a column together, instead of the traditional RDBMS storage method of storing entire rows together, either in a index organized manner, like InnoDB, or in a heap, like MyISAM.  

Columnar storage has the benefit of reducing IO when only a subset of the row is accessed in a query, because only the data for the accessed rows must be read from disk (or cache) instead of having to read entire rows.  Most columnar stores do not support indexes, but WARP does.

WARP is open source

You can find the WARP source code release on GitHub.  Binaries can be provided upon request.  Simply open an issue for your desired Linux distribution, and I will make them available as soon as I can.

…

Join Peter Zaitsev, Percona CEO, as he discusses MySQL 8 Observability.

Broken MySQL means broken application, so maintaining insights in MySQL operational performance is critical. Thankfully, MySQL 8 offers a lot in terms of observability to resolve problems quickly and get great insights into opportunities for optimization. In this talk, we will cover the most important observability improvements in MySQL 8 ranging from Performance Schema and Information Schema to enhanced error logging and optimizer trace. If you are a Developer or DBA passionate about Observability, or just want to be empowered to resolve MySQL problems quickly and efficiently, you should attend.

Please join Peter Zaitsev on Wednesday, July 15 at 1 pm EDT for his webinar “MySQL 8 Observability“.

…

MySQL has multiple mutex implementations viz. wrapper over pthread, futex based, Spin-Lock based (EventMutex). All of them have their own pros and cons but since long MySQL defaulted to EventMutex as it has been found to be optimal for MySQL use-cases.

EventMutex was switched to use C++ atomic (with MySQL adding support for C++11). Given that MySQL now also support ARM, ensuring a correct use of memory barrier is key to keep the EventMutex Optimal moving forward too.

In this article we will use an example of EventMutex and understand the memory barrier and also see what is missing, what could be optimized, etc…

Understanding acquire and release memory order

ARM/PowerPC follows weak memory model that means operations can be re-ordered more freely so ensuring the correct barrier with synchronization logic is important. Easiest alternative is to rely on a default one that uses sequential consistency (as done …

Modern systems are complicated beasts with lots of interdependent activities between threads, programs and kernels. Figuring out some problems is nearly impossible without building some time machine and crystal ball mix that tells exactly what happened.

Did your cgroups CPU limit inject a sleep in the middle of mmap_sem acquisition by ‘ps’? Is everyone waiting for a mutex that is held by someone who is waiting for a DNS response? Did you forget to lock in your libnss.* libraries into memory and hence ended up stalling in unexpected place under memory pressure?

I’ve grabbed Brendan Gregg‘s offcpu profiler, gutted it to the point where all it does is record longest waits per stack trace, as well as timestamp of the longest wait.

Some debugging sessions that would’ve taken hours, days or weeks before now are few minute endeavors. It is still quite hacky, so …