It is essential to upgrade MySQL to the most recent version. Do you believe it’s tough to test and upgrade to a newer version?

For a variety of reasons, including new features, performance advantages, bug corrections, and so on, databases with obsolete versions are vulnerable. Major version upgrades, on the other hand, can be problematic if they haven’t been extensively tested with your application, as the procedure may break it, prevent it from functioning properly, or result in performance concerns.

Let’s go through a few useful tools that can assist you with MySQL upgrades.

• pt-upgrade

The tool helps you run application SELECT queries and generates reports on how each query pattern performs on the servers across the different versions of MySQL we tested.

• …

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) offers a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the state transfer (SST) options (used when a new node is automatically provisioned with data). For many environments, on-the-fly compression capability gives great benefits of saving network bandwidth during the process of sending sometimes terabytes of data. The usual choice for compression here is a built-in Percona XtraBackup compress option (using qpress internally), or options compressor/decompressor for the compression tool of choice. In the second case, the popular option is the gzip or its …

With modern application design, systems are becoming more diverse, varied and have more components than ever before. Developers are often forced to become master chefs adding the ingredients from dozens of different technologies and blending them together to create something tasty and amazing. But with so many different ingredients, it is often difficult to understand how the individual ingredients interact with each other. The more diverse the application, the more likely it is that some seemingly insignificant combination of technology may cause cascading effects.

Many people I talk to have hundreds if not thousands of different libraries, APIs, components, and services making up the systems they support. In this type of environment, it is very difficult to know what small thing could add up to something much bigger. Look at some of the more recent …

Recently we were asked to check the performance of the new family of AMD EPYC processors when using MySQL in Google Cloud Virtual Machines. This was motivated by a user running MySQL in the N1 machines family and willing to upgrade to N2D generation considering the potential cost savings using the new AMD family. 

The idea behind the analysis is to do a side-by-side comparison of performance considering some factors: 

• EPYC processors have demonstrated better performance in purely CPU-based operations according to published benchmarks. 
• EPYC platform has lower costs compared to the Intel Xeon platform. 

The goal of this analysis is to check if cost reductions by upgrading from N1 to N2D are worth the change to avoid suffering from performance problems and eventually reduce the machine size from the current 64 cores based (N1 n1-highmem-64 – Intel Haswell) to either N2D 64 …

In this blog post, we will compare the performance of performing a backup from a MySQL database using mysqldump, MySQL Shell feature called Instance Dump, mysqlpump, mydumper, and Percona XtraBackup. All these available options are open source and free to use for the entire community.

To start, let’s see the results of the test.

Benchmark Results

The benchmark was run on an …

Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0.25 (PXC) has introduced a new option to perform online schema modifications: NBO (Non-Blocking Operation).

When using PXC, the cluster relies on the wsrep_OSU_method parameter to define the Online Schema Upgrade (OSU) method the node uses to replicate DDL statements. 

Until now, we normally have three options:

• Use Total Isolation Order (TOI, the default)
• Use Rolling Schema Upgrade (RSU)
• Use Percona’s online schema change tool (TOI + PTOSC)

Each method has some positive and negative aspects. TOI will lock the whole …

For a long time, MyDumper has been in Max Bubenick’s personal GitHub repository. Now, we decided to move to a new MyDumper’s Organization as requested earlier this year by a user from the community.

There were also two other reasons why we decided to move it. The first one is related to how the project is evolving, and the second is that it will allow us to implement integrations to other projects.

We can see the evolution of the project, noting the increase in commits of the last year:

We tried to keep the release cycle every two months, focusing on closing as many bugs as possible and implementing new features requested. It was not an easy task, as lots of changes had to be implemented in mydumper and myloader engine to allow the new features to be developed. 

Working on a real case scenario in a five node Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), we were forced to use wsrep_sync_wait = 1, because the app does reads-after-write and we send reads to all the nodes. We had the idea to leave some nodes in DESYNC mode to reduce the flow control messages during peak load and expected to have a steadier write throughput keeping the read consistency.

We decided to test Perconas’s new PXC Scheduler Handler which is an application that manages integration between ProxySQL and Galera/PXC (the scope is to maintain the ProxySQL mysql_server table, if a negative scenario occurs, like: failures, service degradation, and maintenance). However, we realized that when a node is in DESYNC mode, it is kicked out of the read hostgroup. That is …

The new MyDumper 0.11.3 version, which includes many new features and bug fixes, is now available.  You can download the code from here.

We are very proud to announce that we were able to achieve the two main objectives for the milestone ZSTD and Stream support!  We added four packages with ZSTD support because not all the distributions have support for v1.4 or higher. Package libzstd is required to use ZSTD compression. ZSTD Bullseye package is only available with libraries for Percona Server for MySQL 8.0. There are two main use cases for the Stream functionality:

• Importing while you are exporting
• Remote backups
…

A recommendation we often give to our customers is along the lines of “archive old data” to reduce your database size. There is a tradeoff between keeping all our data online and archiving part of it to cold storage.

There could also be legal requirements to keep certain data online, or you might want to query old data occasionally without having to go through the hassle of restoring an old backup.

In this post, we will explore a very useful feature of AWS RDS/Aurora that allows us to export data to an S3 bucket and run SQL queries directly against it.

Archiving Data to S3

Let’s start by describing the steps we need to take to put our data into an S3 bucket in the required format, which is called Apache Parquet.

Amazon states the Parquet format is up to 2x faster to export and consumes up to 6x less storage in S3, compared to other text formats.

1. Create a snapshot of the database (or …