This article outlines the basic configurations for setting up and deploying Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 (PXC) on Amazon EC2, as well as what is new in the setup compared to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.

What is Percona XtraDB Cluster an ideal fit for?

Percona XtraDB Cluster is a cost-effective, high-performance clustering solution for mission-critical data. It combines all the improvements, and functionality found in MySQL 8 with Percona Server for MySQL‘s Enterprise features and Percona’s upgraded Galera library.

A Percona XtraDB Cluster environment is an ideal fit for applications requiring 5-9s uptime with high read …

In my previous blog post, ProcFS UDF: A Different Approach to Agentless Operating System Observability in Your Database, I wrote about the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin, which allows you to get operating systems stats, through the MySQL database, without having shell access to the server and any local agent installation.

Some of you wondered whether there is a way to use this goodness in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), and this blog post will show you exactly how to do that.

Unfortunately, at this point, Percona Monitoring and Management does not support the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin out of the box. It is in the backlog, along with many other cool things. However, …

We often see an int column of a table that needs to be changed to unsigned-int and then unsigned-bigint due to the value being out of range. Sometimes, there may even be blockers that prevent us from directly altering the table or applying pt-online-schema-change on the primary, which requires the rotation solution: apply the change on the replica first, switch over the writes to the replica, and then apply the change on the previous primary. In this case, MySQL will have to replicate unsigned-int to unsigned-bigint for a while.

One might think it is obvious and straightforward that MySQL should be able to replicate unsigned-int to unsigned-bigint because unsigned-bigint has a larger size(8 bytes) which covers unsigned-int(4 bytes). It is partly true, but there are some tricks in practice. This blog will show you those tricks through the scenarios.

Let’s understand the scenarios and issues that one may face when replicating from …

You may have read MyRocks Use Case: Big Dataset and been intrigued enough to want to evaluate RocksDB with InnoDB.  It has several advantages including requiring less storage space.

So how do you start?

On a fresh install of Percona Server for MySQL, install RocksDB by entering sudo apt install percona-server-rocksdb:

percona@DellXPS:~$ sudo apt install percona-server-rocksdb
[sudo] password for percona:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
percona-server-rocksdb
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 32 not upgraded.
Need to get 65.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 292 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 …

My last blog, Percona Utilities That Make Major MySQL Version Upgrades Easier, detailed the tools available from the Percona toolkit that assists us with major MySQL version upgrades. The pt-upgrade tool aids in testing application queries and generates reports on how each question performs on servers running various versions of MySQL.

MySQL Shell Upgrade Checker is a utility that helps in compatibility tests between MySQL 5.7 instances and MySQL 8.0 upgrades, which is part of the mysql-shell-utilities. The util.checkForServerUpgrade() function checks whether the MySQL 5.7 instance is ready for the MySQL 8.0 upgrade and generates a report with warnings, errors, and notices for preparing the current MySQL 5.7 setup for upgrading to MySQL 8.0.

We can run this Upgrade Checker Utility in the current MySQL 5.7 …

With the economy slowing down and inflation raging in many parts of the world, your organization will love you if you find ways to reduce the costs of running their MySQL databases. This is especially true if you run MySQL in the cloud, as it often allows you to see the immediate effect of those savings, which is what this article will focus on.

With so many companies announcing layoffs or hiring freezes, optimizing your costs may free enough budget to keep a few team members on or hire folks your team needs so much. 

1. Optimize your schema and queries

While optimizing schema and queries is only going to do so much to help you to save on MySQL costs in the cloud, it is a great thing to start with. Suboptimal …

The title is not entirely true, but ‘FTWRL on MyDumper is not needed anymore for consistent backups’ was a long title. One more time, I wanted to share a new feature in MyDumper. This is related to an important piece: the locking mechanism that mydumper uses to sync all the threads.

MyDumper was born because, at that time, we didn’t have a tool that could take a consistent logical backup using multiple threads. Syncing all the threads was one of the problems, which has been solved using FLUSH TABLE WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL), til all the threads execute START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT (STWCS), then we release the FTWRL and all the threads are in sync. We all know that FTWRL is very expensive and difficult to acquire on some database workloads.

I started to think about alternatives to avoid using FTWRL, and my first thought was, why …

One of the questions I am often asked is in what cases I would prefer MyRocks over InnoDB. We have covered MyRocks in our blog previously:

MyRocks Performance – Percona Database Performance Blog

Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud – Percona Database Performance Blog

But it would be good to refresh some materials.

This time I want to take an interesting (and real) data set, which I also covered previously: the Reddit Comments dataset (see Big Dataset: All Reddit Comments – Analyzing with ClickHouse – Percona Database Performance Blog). The dataset is still available for download from …

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) is a database clustering solution for MySQL. It ensures high availability, prevents downtime and data loss, and provides linear scalability for a growing environment.

Lately, the number of questions about how to build Percona software has 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. This is a really essential question and let’s look at how we build Percona XtraDB Cluster here at Percona.

At the first glance, the building process is not something difficult. Everyone knows that magic make install all command and suppose that as a result everything will be …

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.29-21, we added one more patch that helps us to build server code on macOS. To be precise here, we still could do this even before this patch but only partially. Now it is possible to build RocksDB Storage Engine as well.

A word of disclaimer here, at the moment, by macOS we still understand macOS for Intel x86_64 architecture (the most recent ARM versions with Apple M1 / M2 processors are out of the scope of this blog post). Moreover, Percona does not provide …