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, …

In April 2021, I wrote an article about Online DDL and Group Replication. At that time we were dealing with MySQL 8.0.23 and also opened a bug report which did not have the right answer to the case presented. 

Anyhow, in that article I have shown how an online DDL was de facto locking the whole cluster for a very long time even when using the consistency level set to EVENTUAL.

This article is to give justice to the work done by the MySQL/Oracle engineers to correct that annoying inconvenience. 

Before going ahead, let us remember how an Online DDL was propagated in a group replication cluster, and identify the differences with what happens now, all with the consistency level set to EVENTUAL ( …

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 …

Security will always be a main focal point of a company’s data. A common question I get from clients is, “how do I enable encryption?” Like every good consulting answer, it depends on what you are trying to encrypt. This post is a high-level summary of the different options available for encryption in Percona Server for MySQL.

Different certifications require different levels of encryption. For example, PCI requires both encryptions of data at rest and in transit. Here are the main facets of encryption for MySQL:

• Data at Rest
  • Full disk encryption (at the OS level)
  • Transparent Data Encryption – TDE
  • Column/field-level encryption
• Data in Transit
  • TLS Connections

Data at Rest

…