Earlier in November, we had a chance to present the “Google Cloud Platform: MySQL at Scale with Reliable HA.” We discussed different approaches to hosting MySQL in Google Cloud Platform with the available options’ pros and cons. This webinar was recorded and can be viewed here at any time. We had several great questions, which we would like to address and elaborate on the answers given during the webinar.

Q: What is your view on Cloud SQL High Availability in Google Cloud?

A: Google Cloud SQL provides High Availability through regional instances. If your Cloud SQL database is regional, it means that there’s a standby instance in another zone within the same region. Both instances (primary and standby) are kept synced through synchronous replication on the persistent …

A lot of elements take part in a good backup strategy. Two of them are:

• Where to store your backups – Never on the same server. Preferable not in the same datacenter. Ideally far enough so you can restore in case of a natural disaster (region flood, extended local power outage, etc…).
• Retention period – The longer, the better.

Those points relate directly to costs. Storing a backup on an off-site facility cost money. Keeping the backups available to fulfill your retention period policy costs money.

The main cloud providers have different layers of storage often called Storage Class. Each layer has its own particularities and policies, but they come with an important factor – Cost!

We are happy to announce that starting at …

MySQL 5.7, alongside other many improvements, brought bulk load for creating an index (WL#7277 to be specific), which made ADD INDEX operations much faster by disabling redo logging and making the changes directly to tablespace files. This change requires extra care for backup tools. To block DDL statements on an instance, Percona Server for MySQL implemented LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP. Percona XtraBackup (PXB) uses this lock for the duration of the backup. This lock does not affect DML statements.

MySQL 5.7 doesn’t have an option to block an instance against DDL and to allow all MDL’s. Thus, Percona XtraBackup has also implemented –lock-ddl-per-table. Before we go into other details, let’s understand how –lock-ddl-per-table works up to now:

1. PXB …

As mentioned in the AWS discussion forum back in October, Amazon has started the end of life (EOL) process for RDS MySQL version 5.5. What this means is:

• AWS will upgrade RDS instances to MySQL 5.7 starting February 9 2021 00:00 UTC during your next defined maintenance window, provided you have one.
• If you don’t have a maintenance window defined, RDS will automatically upgrade you on March 9 00:00 UTC and there is no opt-out.

As any seasoned administrator knows, upgrades can be painful and things might go wrong.

Risks

I think we can safely assume that the upgrade will be performed in-place, as it would be too complex and time-consuming otherwise. Since a direct upgrade from 5.5 to 5.7 is not supported, we need to go through 5.6 first. This means instances need to be restarted twice; first to go from …

MySQL Shell is an advanced client tool that has many features and is easy to use. The recent MySQL release (MySQL 8.0.22) has the utility “exportTable()”, which supports exporting the data into a file from a table using MySQL shell. The exported data file can be imported using the utility “importTable()”, which was released in MySQL 8.0.17.

With “exportTable()”, you can export the data into a local server or in any S3-compliant object storage provider. In this blog, I am going to explain how those exportTable() & importTable() utilities are working in local servers and I also did some tests with MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 5.6.

Overview of exportTable() & importTable() exportTable():

• Introduced in MySQL 8.0.22. 
• The utility is used to export the data from the MySQL table into a data file. 
• It can be used to export the table to a local server or any S3-compliant object …

The benefits of jemalloc versus glibc memory allocator for use with MySQL have been widely discussed. With jemalloc (along with Transparent Huge Pages disabled) there is less memory fragmentation, and thus more efficient resource management of the server memory. For MySQL 5.6, installing jemalloc is enough to enable it when starting the MySQL process. However, for MySQL 5.7 and 8.0.X series, you will need to take a few extra steps.

Enabling jemalloc on Percona Server for MySQL

Installing the jemalloc package is simple for Percona. This is because the library is available on the Percona repository, which is available for both apt and yum package management:

…

Kubernetes operators are meant to simplify the deployment and management of applications. Our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster serves the purpose, but also provides users the flexibility to fine-tune their MySQL and proxy services configuration.

The document Changing MySQL Options describes how to provide custom

my.cnf

configuration to the operator. But what would happen if you made a mistake and specified the wrong parameter in the configuration?

Apply Configuration

I already deployed my Percona XtraDB Cluster and deliberately submitted the wrong

my.cnf

  configuration in

cr.yaml

 :

spec:
...
  pxc:
    configuration: | …

Our recent survey showed that many organizations saw unexpected growth around cloud and data. Unexpected bills can become a big problem, especially in such uncertain times. This blog post talks about how Kubernetes scaling capabilities work with Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC Operator) and can help you to control the bill.

Resources

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator and on top of it, it has great scaling capabilities. Scaling can help you to utilize your cluster better and do not waste money on excessive capacity. But before scaling we need to understand what capacity is and how Kubernetes manages CPU and memory resources.

There are two resource concepts that you should be aware of: …

Mysqlpump is a client program that was released with MySQL 5.7.8 and is used to perform logical backups in a better way. Mysqlpump supports parallelism and it has the capability of creating compressed output. Pablo already wrote a blog about this utility (The mysqlpump Utility), and in this blog, I am going to explore the available compression techniques in the Mysqlpump utility.

Overview

Mysqlpump has three options to perform the compression backup.

–compress: Used to compress all the information sent between client and server.

–compression-algorithm: It was added in MySQL 8.0.18. Used to define the compression algorithm for all incoming connections to the server. (available options: zlib, zstd, uncompressed )

–compress-output: Used to define the …

In my talk on Percona Live (download the presentation), I spoke about how we can use Percona Kubernetes Operators to deploy our own Database-as-Service, based on fully OpenSource components and independent from any particular cloud provider.

Today I want to mention an important tool that I use to test our Operators: ChaosMesh, which actually is part of CNCF and recently became GA version 1.0.

ChaosMesh seeks to deploy chaos engineering experiments in Kubernetes deployments which allows it to test how deployment is resilient against different kinds of failures.

Obviously, this tool is important for Kubernetes Database …