In this blog post, I will show you how easy it is to set up a Percona Monitoring and Management server on Google Compute Engine from the command line.

First off you will need to have a Google account and install the Cloud SDK tool. You need to create a GCP (Google Cloud Platform) project and enable billing to proceed. This blog assumes you are able to authenticate and SSH into instances from the command line.

Here are the steps to install PMM server in Google Cloud Platform.

1) Create the Compute engine instance with the following command. The example creates an Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS compute instance in the us-west1-b zone with a 100GB persistent disk. For production systems it would be best to use a 500GB disk instead (size=500GB). This should be …

In this blog, I will show you how to install PMM on Linode as a low-cost database monitoring solution.

Many of my friends use Linode to run their personal sites, as well as small projects. While Linode is no match for Big Cloud providers in features, it is really wonderful when it comes to cost and simplicity: a Linode “nanode” instance offers 1GB of memory, 1 core, 20GB of storage and 1TB of traffic for just $5 a month.

A single Linode instance is powerful enough to use with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to monitor several systems, so I use Linode a lot when I want to demonstrate PMM deployment through Docker, rather than …

Any software system requires secrets to run, be it credentials to communicate with databases, tokens to access resources, or encryption keys that need to be distributed. Secrets management means to deal with all kinds of secrets in a structured and secure way. In this blog entry we will show how to use Hashicorp Vault to […]

Earlier this year, I was presented with the challenge of streamlining user access to MySQL, allowing users self-serve access using their LDAP credentials, while logging all access. Of course, various MySQL forks allow for user auditing, but the solution is also needed to eventually support other data storage systems without native user auditing. This gave me the opportunity to do a trial integration of MySQL, Vault, ProxySQL, and LDAP; Vault would be used to dynamically create user accounts, and ProxySQL would be used to limit access and log activity. To evaluate the functionality and configuration of the integration, I used Docker to set up a test environment.

Below I will present the methods used to:

1. Provision the Docker environment.
2. Configure OpenLDAP. …

MySQL 8.0 GA is right around the corner. I don't have precise information about its release, as I don't work at Oracle. If I did, I would probably know, but I couldn't tell when the release is scheduled to appear because of company policies. I can, however, speculate and infer, based of my experience with previous releases. My personal assessment is that the release will appear before 9:00am PT on April 24, 2018. The "before" can be anything from a few minutes to one week in advance.
Then, again, it may not happen at all if someone finds an atrocious bug that needs to be fixed asap.

Either way, users are keen on testing the new release in its current state of release candidate. Here I show a few methods that allow you to have a taste of the new …

In the following we show how InnoDB cluster can be deployed in a container context. In the official documentation (Introducing InnoDB Cluster), InnoDB is described as: MySQL InnoDB cluster provides a complete high availability solution for MySQL. MySQL Shell includes AdminAPI which enables you to easily configure and administer a group of at least three […]

We started our series on MySQL Docker deploments by showing how to deploy and use MySQL locally with docker-compose in Docker Compose and App Deployment with MySQL. Docker-compose itself is limited to one machine and it does not solve cross-node networking or span multiple datacenters. This is a job for so called cluster schedulers, i.e. […]

In this post we show how to use the mysql-server Docker image for local development. We first introduce a simple example app that starts up and tries to connect to a given db until successful. We then show how to start containers for multiple MySQL versions and use our example app to connect to them. […]

Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Santa Clara, CA, call for papers. It will be open from now until December  22, 2017.

Our theme is “Championing Open Source Databases,” with topics of MySQL, MongoDB and other open source databases, including PostgreSQL, time series databases and RocksDB. Sessions tracks include Developers, Operations and Business/Case Studies.

We’re looking forward to your submissions! We want proposals that cover the many aspects and current trends of using open source databases, including design practices, application development, performance optimization, HA and clustering, cloud, containers and new technologies, as well as new and …

One of the widely discussed technologies at Percona Live Europe was the logistics of running MySQL in containers. Containers – particularly Docker – have become a hot topic, so there was a good-sized crowd on day one of the conference for Ashraf Sharif, Senior Support Engineer with Severalnines. He presented his talk “MySQL on Docker: Containerizing the Dolphin”. 

During his presentation, Ashraf shared some recommendations for best practices when setting out on containerizing MySQL. He sees the trend of moving to containers as a progression from the use of virtual hosts.

After his talk on day one of the Percona Live Europe conference, I caught up with Ashraf and asked about his presentation. I was interested in which concepts are most important for …