MySQL 8.0 will be GA soon (just my assumption: Oracle doesn't tell me anything about its release plans) and it's time to think about having a look at it.
If this is your first try of MySQL 8, get prepared for several impacting differences from previous versions.

In this article I won't tell you what you can do with MySQL 8: there is plenty of material about this, including in this very blog. I will instead concentrate on differences from previous versions that users need to know if they want to avoid surprises.

Data Directory

Let's start with an observation of the data directory.
After a standard installation, without any additional options, I see the following:

Files that I expected to see

auto.cnf
ib_buffer_pool
ib_logfile0
ib_logfile1
ibdata1
ibtmp1
(dir) mysql
(dir) …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Engineer, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Performance Schema for MySQL Troubleshooting on Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 10:00 am PST (UTC-8) / 1:00 pm EST (UTC-5).

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Performance Schema, first introduced in version 5.5, is a really powerful tool. It is actively under development, and each new version provides even more instruments for database administrators.

Performance Schema is complicated. It is also not free: it can slow down performance if you enable certain …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how you can analyze raw MySQL query logs with ClickHouse.

For typical query performance analyses, we have an excellent tool in Percona Monitoring and Management. You may want to go deeper, though. You might be longing for the ability to query raw MySQL “slow” query logs with SQL.

There are a number of tools to load the MySQL slow query logs to a variety of data stores. For example, you can find posts showing how to do it with LogStash. While very flexible, these solutions always look too complicated and limited in functionality to me.   

By far the best solution to parse and load MySQL slow query logs (among multiple log types supported) is Charity …

Where the hell is it?

The MySQL shell is a potentially useful tool that has been intentionally made difficult to use properly.

It was introduced, with much fanfare, with the MySQL Document Store, as THE tool to bridge the SQL and no-SQL worlds. The release was less than satisfactory, though: MySQL 5.7.12 introduced a new feature (the X-protocol plugin) bundled with the server. The maturity of the plugin was unclear, as it popped out of the unknown into a GA release, without any public testing. It was allegedly GA quality, although the quantity of bug reports that were filed soon after the release proved otherwise. The maturity of the shell was known as "development preview", and so we had a supposedly GA feature that could only be used with an alpha …

The latest release of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.8.0 is available as of February 27, 2018.

Percona Monitoring and Management is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

This release introduces many improvements in the user interface and optimizations of performance.

New landing page

The home page has been removed in favor of the …

The conference session schedule for the seventh annual Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place April 23-25 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA is now live and available for review! Advance Registration Discounts can be purchased through March 4, 2018, 11:30 p.m. PST.

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 is the premier open source database event. With a theme of “Championing Open Source Databases,” the conference will feature multiple tracks, including MySQL, MongoDB, Cloud, PostgreSQL, Containers and Automation, Monitoring and Ops, and Database Security. Once again, Percona will be …

How it happened

A few years ago I started thinking about refactoring MySQL-Sandbox. I got lots of ideas and a name for the project (dbdeployer) but went no further. The initial idea (this was 2013!) was to rewrite the project in Ruby: I had been using Ruby at work and it looked like a decent replacement for Perl. My main problem was the difficulty of installation in an uncontrolled environment. If you have control over your environment (it's your laptop or you are in charge of the server configuration via Puppet or similar) then the task is easy. But if you ever need to deploy somewhere with little or no notice, it becomes a problem: there are servers where Perl is not installed, and is common that the server also have a policy forbidding all scripting languages from being deployed. …

In this blog post, we’ll review additional Amazon Aurora MySQL monitoring capabilities we’ve added in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.7.0. You can see them in action in the MySQL Amazon Aurora Metrics dashboard.

Amazon Aurora MySQL Transaction Commits

This graph looks at the number of commits the Amazon Aurora engine performed, as well as the average commit latency. As you can see from this graph, latency does not always correlate with the number of commits performed and can be quite high in certain situations.

Amazon Aurora MySQL …

Percona has revealed the line-up of in-depth tutorials for the Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place April 23-25, 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. Secure your spot now with Advanced Registration prices (available until March 4, 2018). Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available.

Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference is the premier open source database event. The theme for the upcoming conference is “Championing Open Source Databases,” with a range of topics on …

In this blog post, I’ll present the ProxySQL query cache functionality. This is a query caching mechanism on top of ProxySQL. As there are already many how-tos regarding the ProxySQL prerequisites and installation process, we are going to skip these steps. For those who are already familiar with ProxySQL query cache configuration, let’s go directly to the query rules and the performance results.

Before talking about the ProxySQL query cache, let’s take a look at other caching mechanisms available for MySQL environments.

MySQL query cache is a query caching mechanism – deprecated as of MySQL 5.7.20 and removed in MySQL 8.0 – on top of MySQL itself (based on the official MySQL documentation).

The MySQL query cache stores the text of a SELECT statement together with the corresponding result sent to the client. If an identical statement is …