MySQL for RDS and DBaaS, in general, are very controlled environments by the vendors, meaning that there are missing things like a SUPER grant for the root user (and any user in general). This has some implications on operations, one of them being the impossibility of running pt-table-checksum to verify data consistency between a primary and its replicas.

However, there’s a workaround that might overcome this situation and involves three things:

• The pt-table-checksum itself
• A way to collect executed queries
• And the last one, which can be controversial, is to remove the read-only from the replica and use a maintenance window to stop traffic to the database while pt-table-checksum runs.

The problem with RDS is that you cannot change binlog_format to STATEMENT, which is one of the requirements for pt-table-checksum to run.

The workaround consists of capturing the executed …

You may have noticed, I started to blog also on the official Oracle MySQL Blog.

When I will do so, I will also publish my articles on lefred.be after a short delay.

I really invite you to follow the official Oracle MySQL Blog where you will find information related to MySQL Community but also about our webinars.

Currently, we put the highlight on our great new MySQL Database Service on OCI. My first post, is precisely dedicated to it.

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a great community tool for monitoring your OSDB (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) fleet. It’s feature rich, and it’s built and distributed as open-source based on several de-facto industry standard tools such as Grafana and Prometheus. In the second half of last year, major version 2 was released and whereas the major components remained mostly the same, some significant architectural changes were made, but this is out-of-scope for this post.

Upgrading to PMM2 is basically the same as starting from scratch with a fresh install; it requires re-adding all your servers, which can be a painful process if you have a large fleet of instances. For servers where you have OS level access, you can just install the PMM2 agent, but for RDS there is no access to the OS so another approach is required. In this blog, I will focus on getting a large number of RDS instances added.

Adding RDS instances …

Oftentimes, we need to replicate between Amazon Aurora and an external MySQL server. The idea is to start by taking a point-in-time copy of the dataset. Next, we can configure MySQL replication to roll it forward and keep the data up-to-date.

This process is documented by Amazon, however, it relies on the mysqldump method to create the initial copy of the data. If the dataset is in the high GB/TB range, this single-threaded method could take a very long time. Similarly, there are ways to improve the import phase (which can easily take 2x the time of the export).

Let’s explore some tricks to significantly improve the speed of this process.

Preparation Steps

The first step is to enable binary logs in Aurora. Go to the Cluster-level parameter group and make sure binlog_format …

If you are thinking about to move your MySQL databases to the Cloud but you are still reticent, you can maybe use the “Oracle Cloud Free Tier” offer to test it.

Oracle Cloud Free Tier offers you 2 Oracle Autonomous Databases and 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute VMs as Always Free services and in addition a 30-day Free Trial with US$300 in free credits.
On these VMs instances (provisioned and managed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute) you can install your MySQL server. Let’s see how…

Oracle Cloud account creation

Connect to the Oracle Cloud page and fill in your credentials:
…

In Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) versions prior to 1.5.0, there were two methods for upgrading PXC clusters, and both of these use built-in StatefulSet update strategies. The first one is manual (OnDelete update strategy) and the second one is semi-automatic (RollingUpdate strategy). Since the Kubernetes operator is about automating the database management, and there are use cases to always keep the database up to date, a new smart update strategy was implemented.

Smart Update Strategy

The smart update strategy can be used to enable automatic context-aware upgrades of PXC clusters between minor versions. One of the use cases for automatic upgrades is if you want to get security …

On July 21, 2020, Percona delivered an updated version of our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) focused on easing deployment and operations management of a clustered MySQL environment. Included in the Percona Distribution for MySQL, our Operator is based on the best practices for MySQL cluster configuration and setup in Kubernetes. This update adds a variety of important new features including:

Smart Update to Safely and Reliably Upgrade your PXC Environment Automatically
We implemented a new update strategy called Smart Update. Smart Update is aware of the context of your environment and minimizes the number of failover events that need to occur to fully upgrade a …

The Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster can send backups to Amazon S3 or S3-compatible storage. And every now and then at Support, we are asked how to send backups to Google Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Storage offers an “interoperability mode” which is S3-compatible. However, there are a few details to take care of when using it.

Google Cloud Storage Configuration

First, select “Settings” under “Storage” in the Navigation Menu. Under Settings, select the Interoperability tab. If Interoperability is not yet enabled, click Enable Interoperability Access. This turns on the S3-compatible interface to Google Cloud Storage.

After enabling S3-compatible storage, an access key needs to be generated. There are two options: Access keys can be tied to Service accounts or User accounts. For …

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     Running …

The Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster(PXC) comes with ProxySQL as part of the deal. And to be honest, the behavior of ProxySQL is pretty much the same as in a regular non-k8s deployment of it. So why bother to write a blog about it? Because what happens around ProxySQL in the context of the operator is actually interesting.

ProxySQL is deployed on its own POD (that can be scaled as well as the PXC Pods can). Each ProxySQL Pod has its own ProxySQL Container and a sidecar container. If you are curious, you can find out which node holds the pod by running

kubectl describe pod cluster1-proxysql-0 | grep Node:
Node: ip-192-168-37-111.ec2.internal/192.168.37.111

Login into and ask for the running containers. You will see something like this:

[root@ip-192-168-37-111 ~]# docker ps | grep -i proxysql …