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 storage …

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 …

So you’ve just added some more memory to your MySQL server; now what? If you’ve been around the MySQL block for a while, you know that nothing is automatically changed to take advantage of this new system RAM. Let’s have a look at a few parameters you would want to adjust.

InnoDB Parameters innodb_buffer_pool_size

The InnoDB buffer pool is “…the memory area that holds cached InnoDB data for both tables and indexes.” This parameter is probably the #1 tuning parameter in MySQL. If your buffer pool is too small, then InnoDB must spend extra CPU/Disk time, loading, and unloading pages in/out of memory. This is time better spent executing your queries.

The default size of this cache is 128MB; woefully small for any serious database. Increasing the size of this cache allows more frequently accessed pages to remain in memory for the fastest access. Obviously, you do not need a buffer pool which is larger than your …

Understanding how MySQL uses memory is key to tuning it for optimal performance as well as troubleshooting cases of unexpected memory usage, i.e. when you have MySQL Server using a lot more than you would expect based on your configuration settings.

Early in MySQL history, understanding memory usage details was hard and included a lot of guesswork.  Is it possible that some queries running require a large temporary table or allocated a lot of memory for stored user variables?  Are any stored procedures taking an unexpectedly high amount of memory? All could be reasons for excessive MySQL memory usage, but you would not easily see if that is just the case.

All that changed with MySQL 5.7, which added memory instrumentation in Performance Schema, and with MySQL 8.0, this instrumentation is enabled by default, so you can get this data from pretty much any running instance.

If you’re looking for current memory …

Galera replication technology, a key component of Percona XtraDB Cluster, suffered from a remote code execution vulnerability. Percona has been working with the vendor since early September on this issue and has made releases available to address the problem.

Applicability

A malicious party with access to the WSREP service port (4567/TCP) as well as prerequisite knowledge of the configuration of the Galera cluster name is required in order to exploit this vulnerability, which leads to remote code execution via the WSREP protocol. 

Fixes are available in Percona XtraDB Cluster versions:

>= 8.0.20-11.2

>= …