What is great with MySQL Shell Plugins, it’s that it provides you an infinite amount of possibilities. While I was writing the part I and part II of the check plugin, I realized I could extend it event more.

The new methods I added to the plugin are especially useful when you are considering to use MySQL InnoDB Cluster in Multi-Primary mode, but not only

Let’s have a look at these new methods:

These 4 new methods are targeting large queries or large transactions. It’s also possible to get the eventual hot spots.

Let’s see the first two that are more basic in action:

The first method …

If you do a quick web search about UUIDs and MySQL, you’ll get a fair number of results. Here are just a few examples:

• Storing UUID and Generated Columns
• Storing UUID Values in MySQL
• Illustrating Primary Key models in InnoDB and their impact on disk usage
• MySQL UUID Smackdown: UUID vs. INT for Primary Key
• GUID/UUID Performance Breakthrough
• …

In a couple previous posts, I explained how to get an “Always Free” Oracle Cloud compute instance and how to install MySQL on it – as well as how to add a web server.

I started my IT career (way back in 1989) using a (dumb) terminal and a 2400-baud modem to access a server. While I still use a terminal window and the command-line, it is always nice to have access to a GUI. In this post, I will show you how to install and use a GUI on your Oracle Cloud …

As Grafana powers our star product – Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) – we have developed a lot of experience creating Grafana Dashboards over the last few years.   In this article, I will share some of the considerations for designing Grafana Dashboards. As usual, when it comes to questions of design they are quite subjective, and I do not expect you to chose to apply all of them to your dashboards, but I hope they will help you to think through your dashboard design better.

Design Practical Dashboards

Grafana features many panel types, and even more are available as plugins. It may be very attractive to use many of them in your dashboards using many different visualization options. Do not!  Stick to a few data visualization patterns and only add additional visualizations when they provide …

In the first part of this article related to the check plugin, we discovered information retrieved from the binary logs. This part, is about what Performance_Schema and SYS can provide us about the queries hitting the MySQL database.

Currently, 3 methods are available:

• getSlowerQuery()
• getQueryTempDisk()
• getFullTableScanQuery()

The method’s name should be self explaining.

This is an overview of the parameters for each methods:

ext.check.getSlowQuery()ext.check.getQueryTempDisk()ext.check.getFullTableScanQuery()

Some methods allow a select parameter if only SELECT statements should be returned.

When only one query is returned (default), it’s also possible to …

In this blog post, we will see how to use perf (a.k.a.: perf_events) together with Flame Graphs. They are used to generate a graphical representation of what functions are being called within our software of choice. Percona Server for MySQL is used here, but it can be extended to any software you can take a resolved stack trace from.

Before moving forward, a word of caution. As with any profiling tool, DON’T run this in production systems unless you know what you are doing.

Installing Packages Needed

For simplicity, I’ll use commands for CentOS 7, but things should be the same for Debian-based distros (apt-get install linux-tools-$(uname -r) instead of the yum command is the only difference in the steps).

To install perf, simply issue:

SHELL> sudo yum install -y perf

By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

We call this approach a ‘Rolling Index Creation’ - if you have a MySQL master-slave replica set, you can create the index one node at a time in a rolling fashion. You should create the index only on the slave nodes so the master’s …

This blog was initially referring to the audit plugin, but I renamed it as check plugin to be more compatible with all the current and future methods included in it.

As you may know, it’s now possible to create your own plugins for MySQL Shell. See the following posts:

• https://lefred.be/content/overview-on-mysql-shell-8-0-17-extensions-plugins-and-how-to-write-yours/
• https://lefred.be/content/mysql-router-8-0-17s-rest-api-mysql-shell-extensions/
• …

I often need to install a certain version of MySQL, MariaDB, or Percona Server for MySQL to run some experiments, whether to check for behavior differences or to provide tested instructions. In this blog series, I will look into how you can install MySQL, MariaDB, or Percona Server for MySQL with Docker.  This post, part one, is focused on MySQL Server.

Docker is actually not my most preferred way as it does not match a typical production install, and if you look at service control behavior or file layout it is quite different.  What is great about Docker though is that it allows installing the latest MySQL version – as well as any other version – very easily.

Docker also is easy to use when you need a simple, single instance.  If you’re looking into some replication-related behaviors, …

In a previous post, I explained how you can take advantage of Oracle’s “Always Free” Cloud instance to obtain a free Oracle Cloud compute instance (virtual machine) and install a copy of MySQL – without having to pay a setup fee and without incurring any monthly charges. And, you can have two free compute instances per account.

This free Cloud option from Oracle is great. I can think of a lot of ways to utilize a free Oracle Cloud compute instance – but the first one that came to …