Overview

When working with Amazon AWS Aurora, there are some steps to consider when trying to get data out of an active Aurora master into a slave, potentially into a EC2 instance or offsite in another data centre. Creating an external mysql to Aurora gives the option to move out of Aurora, or to have the flexibility to move data around as desired. With AWS RDS instances this task is pretty simple because you can do the following :

1. Create a read replica
2. Stop the slave process
3. Capture the positioning
4. Dump the database

With Aurora it’s a little trickier, because a read replica in Aurora has no slave process. All of the replication is handled on the back end and cannot be controlled. However, setting up an external slave can be done.

Amazon AWS Documentation

In …

Some time ago, I published the article on AWS Aurora Benchmarking (AWS Aurora Benchmarking – Blast or Splash?), in which I analyzed the behavior of different solutions using synchronous replication in AWS environment. This blog follows up with some of the comments and suggestions I received regarding that post from the community and Amazon engineers.

I decided to perform another round of tests, keeping in mind comments and suggestions received.

I presented some of the results during the Percona conference in Santa Clara last April 2016. The following is the transposition that presentation, with more details.

Not interested in the preliminary descriptions? Go to the results section

Why new tests?

Recently, I happened to have an onsite engagement and the goal of the engagement was to move a database service to RDS Aurora. Like probably most of you, I knew the service by name but I couldn’t say much about it, so, I Googled, I listened to talks and I read about it. Now that my onsite engagement is over, here’s my first impression of Aurora.

First, let’s describe the service itself. It is part of RDS and, at first glance, very similar to a regular RDS instance. In order to setup an Aurora instance, you go to the RDS console and you either launch a new instance choosing Aurora as type or you create a snapshot of a RDS 5.6 instance and migrate it to Aurora. While with a regular MySQL RDS instance you can create slaves, with Aurora you can add reader nodes to an existing cluster. An Aurora cluster minimally consists of a …

This Log Buffer Edition dives deep into the ocean of blogosphere and surfaces with some cool blog posts from Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

• Lets Talk DB Perth
• The Fundamental Challenge of Computer System Performance
• Index Advanced Compression: Multi-Column Index
• Middleware Diagnostics Advisor (MDA) Setup
• Most people are now aware that in 12c, a …

Recently we encountered an issue with aurora, where our cpu started spiking every X minutes. (X < 30)

we had like 20-30 connections, out of which majority were inserts and a few selects.

every time the spike occurred our inserts would start waiting and waiting….

here is innotop output

we checked our code. nothing major had changed.

The mysql error log had this mysterious message which i could not trace in the mysql/percona/maria source.

“Innodb: Retracted crabbing in btr_cur_search_to_nth_level 33001 times since restart”

if you get to know the meaning of this – please do let me know – would love to understand this.

…

There are a lot of blog posts on the internet which warn you about using the Query Cache in MySQL.

I was surprised to see that the query cache was enabled in Aurora.

This was the size on a ‘db.r3.large’ instance.

On a ‘db.r3.2xlarge’  instance, it was set to 2460900352 i.e. 2.4GB

I am not sure, if amazon has done something to improve the query cache.

So, do run tests with Aurora and see if the cache suits you.

Amazon recently announced RDS Aurora a new addition to their database as a service offerings. Here’s Mark Callaghan’s take on what’s happening under the hood and thoughts from Fusheng Han. Amazon is uniquely positioned with RDS to take on offerings like Clustrix. So it’s definitely worth reading Dave Anselmi’s take on Aurora. Join 28,000 others […]