Oracle released MySQL 8.0.28 on January 18th with little fanfare, as part of their four times a year release cycle.  So what is included in the new release? Over the past few years, there have been some cool new features included in these ‘dot’ releases that some in the community say would have been better off being labeled as a major release. But what is in .28? Below are the more interesting changes in the database server and the shell, as there was not a whole lot changed in the other products such as router or MEM… I put my asides in italics and my views probably do not reflect the views of anyone else.

And remember, 8.0.29 is due in April.

The TL;DR

The TL;DR synopsis is that a lot of excellent work went into MySQL Server & shell 8.0.28 but the pressing question is do you really need to install it right away?  On the scale from ‘you probably should wait to upgrade’ to ‘update ASAP’ it …

KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) is an open standard developed by OASIS (Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for the encryption of stored data and cryptographic key management.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.27 and Percona XtraBackup 8.0.27 now include a KMIP keyring plugin to enable the exchange of cryptographic keys between a key management server and the database for encryption purposes. The procedure to use them with HashiCorp Vault Enterprise is described below.

Install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise

We will first install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise on Ubuntu Linux “Bionic” and then enable …

It is always hard to select a CPU for your own purpose. You could waste hours reviewing different benchmarks, reviews, and bloggers, and in the end, we would limit all our requirements to performance and price. For performance measuring we already have some specific metrics (e.g. in MHz to some specific tool), however, for economic comparison, it is quite hard.  Mostly we are limited by our budget. Again, for our personal purposes, we are limited only with the cash in our pockets. It is easy to compare only two or three CPUs; it is required just to compare their price and performance and then create a simple bar plot and then check the results. However, what do you do if you have at least three types of CPU, a different number of CPUs cores on board, and seven different scenarios?  It was a challenge to do it for performance, and for economic efficiency, it has become a nightmare. For a one-time purchase, it should be easier than for the …

Incremental backups of MySQL, specifically for the InnoDB engine, are taken by copying modified pages from the previous backup.

The brute force method takes backups by scanning every page in tablespace file in the server data directory is an expensive operation. The time required for incremental backups increases as the data-dir size increases.

To solve this problem, Percona Server for MySQL introduced a  “Changed Page Tracking” feature in 5.6 that enables Percona XtraBackup (PXB) to copy only the modified pages required for incremental backups. See the Percona XtraBackup Documentation for more information. …

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 XtraBackup delivers the xbcloud binary – an auxiliary tool to allow users to upload backups to different cloud providers directly.

Today we are glad to announce the support of the Azure Blob storage to xbcloud.

This new feature will allow you to upload/download backups to Azure Blob storage. You would need an Azure storage account and access key. Check out this blog post on how to get one through the Azure portal.

This new functionality is available in the release of Percona XtraBackup 8.0.27 and will be available in Percona XtraBackup …

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 …

Backups are a key part of a disaster recovery strategy, making sure you can continue or restore your business in case of an unwanted event with your data.

We always work on trying to improve Percona XtraBackup reliability, always favoring consistency, attempting to make unwanted outcomes be noticed as earlier as possible in the process.

Enabling –strict by Default

As of the upcoming release of 8.0.27, XtraBackup will no longer accept invalid parameters. Since the beginning of the times, validation of parameters has been a difficult task for XtraBackup as it mixes server-side and XtraBackup only parameters.

Starting at Percona XtraBackup 8.0.7 we implemented …

The most common issue when using row-based replication (RBR) is replication lag due to the lack of Primary keys.

The problem is that any replicated DML will do a full table scan for each modified row on the replica. This bug report explains it more in-depth: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=53375

For example, if a delete is executed on the following table definition:

CREATE TABLE `joinit` (
  `i` int NOT NULL,
  `s` varchar(64) DEFAULT NULL,
  `t` time NOT NULL,
  `g` int NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

With this amount of rows:

mysql> select count(*) from joinit;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|  1048576 |
+----------+

The delete being:

mysql> flush status ;

mysql> delete from joinit where i > 5 and i < 150;
Query OK, 88 rows affected (0.04 sec) …

Recently we published the first part (m5, m5a, m6g) and the second part (C5, C5a, C6g) of research regarding comparing Graviton ARM with AMD and Intel CPU on AWS. We selected general-purpose EC2 instances with the same configurations (amount of vCPU in the first part). In the second part, we compared compute-optimized EC2 instances with the same conditions. The main goal was to see the trend and make a general comparison of CPU types on the AWS platform only for MySQL. We didn’t set the goal to compare the performance of different CPU types. Our expertise is in MySQL performance tuning. We share research “as is” with all scripts, and anyone interested could rerun and reproduce it.
All scripts, …