There are different reasons for upgrading your databases. It could be to apply security fixes, to use new features, solve compatibility issues, or just to keep your system up-to-date. This upgrade can be a major upgrade or a minor one, and depending on the technology, there are different approaches to do this job, but if you need your systems running all the time with zero downtime, performing a rolling upgrade could be the best option.

In this blog, we will see some considerations to take into account before upgrading and how to perform a rolling upgrade on MySQL.

Minor vs Major Upgrades

In general, minor upgrades are safe in the way that you can easily downgrade or rollback it and should be compatible with the previous packages and features.

Major version upgrade involves some risks like database package removal, …

 I am please to announce that the Second Edition of MySQL and JSON - A Practical Programming Guide is now Available.  The new book is twice the length of the first edition due to  the many advancements made by MySQL Engineering over the past two years. 

Who needs this book:   Anyone wanting to take advantage of the MySQL JSON data type for storing JSON formatted data, those wanting to turn relational data into JSON, those who want to make their JSON data relational, and those seeking a through introduction into the use of MySQL as a NoSQL JSON 

document store.  The second edition features even more illustrations, code examples, and covers the many new features added in the last two years including JSON document validation (yes, you can have required fields, type checking, and constraints on your JSON data before it gets into the database), new MySQL …

Tweet

It is a year of online conferences and next week, the time has come to Oracle Developer Live for MySQL. It consists of a keynote at the start of the day and two tracks at the rest of the day. The event takes place in two rounds: On 13 October the event takes place during American business hours, and on 15 October it happens during European, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian-Pacific business hours/evening.

Recording Available

If you missed the talk, you can watch a recording at https://youtu.be/ZH03kXN5-Ok.

I am honoured to have been given the opportunity to speak about MySQL performance tuning. On …

Percona Live Online Agenda Slot: Wed 21 Oct • New York 2:30 a.m. • London 7:30 a.m. • New Delhi 12:00 noon • Singapore 2:30 p.m.

Abstract

For many, running an online schema migration operation is still a manual job: from building the correct command, through identifying where the migration should run and which servers are to be affected, to auditing progress and completing the migration. Sharded environment poses an additional burden, as any logical migration must be applied multiple times, once for each shard.

What if you could just issue an ALTER TABLE … statement, and have all that complexity automated away? Vitess, an open source sharding framework for MySQL, is in a unique position to do just that. This session shows how Vitess’s proxy/agent/topology architecture, together with gh-ost, are used to hide schema change …

For what reason should I use a real multi-primary setup?

To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) or Percona Server for MySQL using Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”.

After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99.995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes of downtime in a year, what is left?

Disaster Recovery? Well, that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle.

And we know …

Percona Live Online Agenda Slot: Wed 21 Oct • New York 4:30 a.m. • London 9:30 a.m • New Delhi 2:00 p.m. • Singapore 4:30 p.m.

Abstract

Starting with AWS, the major cloud providers offer different options to run a MySQL or a MySQL-compatible database on the cloud. A new approach is to rely on so-called serverless (relational) databases like Aurora Serverless that offer both traditional TCP connections and HTTP API access. Can serverless really be the future? Can data API really replace a MySQL connector? What are the major limitations of a serverless database cluster and do they really protect from inefficient use of database resources?

Why is your talk exciting?

The database is the most challenging layer to optimize resources in the cloud and achieve elasticity. Serverless relational databases can help in that but …

I’m glad that testing new MySQL releases is so frequent for me. Each testing cycle let me catch warning messages about deprecated behaviors before they’re removed. This one announced the deprecation of digits for floating point data types, like double. The following column definition for a table in my code tree triggered the warning message:

, amount                DOUBLE(10,2)

MySQL 8 (8.0.21) raised the following warning message:

Warning (code 1681): Specifying number of digits for floating point data types is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Recognizing the deprecation, I redefined the column as:

, amount                DOUBLE

I’m glad the MySQL development team is focused on alerting us to deprecations through warning messages. Naturally, I fixed all of …

Recently I was dealing with an unexpected issue raised by our Support customer, in which data became inconsistent after a schema change was applied.

After some investigation, it turned out that affected tables had a special word in the comments of some columns, which triggered an already known (and fixed) issue with the TableParser.pm library of Percona Toolkit.  The problem is that the customer was using an outdated Toolkit version, where pt-online-schema-change was using that buggy parser.

This bug applies only to Percona Toolkit versions up to 3.0.10, so if you have already 3.0.11 or newer installed, you can skip the rest of this post as these are no longer affected.

I am writing this post to warn every user of pt-online-schema-change who has not upgraded the toolkit, as …

There is NEW ERA for Galera Cluster monitoring and management and as we just recently released Galera Manager 1.0 into the wild for everyone to deploy their Galera Clusters within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment to achieve MySQL High Availability, Multi-Master MySQL, active-active clustering out of the box on Amazon and Disaster Recovery, all from the comfort of a web-based graphical user interface (GUI).

The Galera Manager is the new graphical user interface (GUI) tool for provisioning Galera Clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It allows an administrator to easily create and add nodes, without manually having to configure each node. Perhaps more useful is that Galera Manager provides charts for monitoring the host and database metrics, to ensure the proper and efficient functioning of …

Visibility is a blessing, and with databases, visibility is a must. That’s true not only for metrics but for the queries themselves. Having info on all the stats around query execution is priceless, and Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) offers that in the form of the Query Analytics dashboard (QAN).

But where to start? QAN helps you with that by calculating the query profile. What is the profile? It’s a rank of queries, ordered by Load, so it is easy to spot the heaviest queries hitting your database. The Load is defined as the “Average Active Queries” but can also be defined as a mix of Query Execution Time Plus Query count. In other words, all the time the query was alive and kicking.

The Profile in PMM 2.10.0 looks like this:

The purpose of this profile is to facilitate the task of finding the …