The Problem

I recently worked on a customer engagement where the customer needed to archive a high amount of rows from different tables into another server (in this example for simplicity I am just archiving the results into a file). 

As explained in this other blog post, “Want to archive tables? Use Percona Toolkit’s pt-archiver“, you can use pt-archiver to purge/archive rows from a table that match any “WHERE” condition, but this case was not that easy as the archive/delete condition was complex and involved joining many tables…

The archive conditions involved four tables with the following query and the following table schema. In the example, there are no foreign keys, but this method can be used also with foreign keys by reordering the table archive/purge.

And the delete condition is …

Don’t Try This at Home!

Disclaimer: The procedure described in this blog post is not officially supported by Percona XtraBackup. Use it under your responsibility. I tested and used it successfully, but your mileage may vary.

Note from the author: Wikipedia defines clickbait as text (or a link) that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to read that online content, with a defining characteristic of being deceptive. Maybe the headline of this post is a bit deceptive, as there is no Percona XtraBackup for Windows, but I hope you will not feel deceived after reading this blog post, I just felt that it was funny to use a clickbait-style while writing it.

He Couldn’t Believe it When He Read That Post!

Pep had to migrate a client database from Windows to Linux …

This quickstart shows you how to use the Azure portal to deploy a dedicated Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 drop-in replacement for MySQL that provides superior performance, scalability, and instrumentation. It also shows you how to connect to the server.

Prerequisites

Existing Azure subscription. If you don’t have a subscription, create a free Azure account before starting.

Create Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 Azure Instance

1. Go to the Azure portal to create a MySQL database using Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 image. Search for and select Percona Server for MySQL 8.0:
2. On the Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 page, press Create:
…

Starting with the release of proxysql-admin 2.0.15,  the proxysql-admin 2.x series can now encrypt the credentials needed to access proxysql and cluster nodes. This only applies to the proxysql-admin configuration, this does not change the ProxySQL config, so those credentials are still unencrypted.

The credentials file is the unencrypted file containing the usernames, passwords, hostnames, and ports needed to connect to ProxySQL and PXC (Percona XtraDB Cluster).

The proxysql-login-file tool is used to encrypt the credentials file. This encrypted file is known as a login-file. This login-file can then be used by the proxysql-admin and proxysql-status scripts.

Note: This feature requires OpenSSL v1.1.1 and above (with the exception of Ubuntu 16.04). Please see the …

In my talk at Percona Live 2021, “Creating Chaos in Databases”, I discussed how creating a controlled interruption in available resources (I used primary pod and network interruptions) allows us to test the stability of a database, and in our case, Percona XtraDB Cluster.

I also mentioned in the talk that my testing led to diagnosing a few unpleasant bugs, namely:

• PXC-3437: Node fails to join in the endless loop
• PXC-3580: Aggressive network outages on one node makes the whole cluster unusable
• …

When organizing things helps to simplify life.

In the previous article, we start to explore dynamic privileges and the interaction with static ones. We also saw how to remove SUPER privilege from a DBA account. 

What we did was go by subtraction. But in real life, we should act differently. We should ADD only what is really needed for the account to work correctly.

Adding privilege one by one, and for each user is problematic given the level of interaction they may have, and also prone to mistakes. 

Instead, we can use ROLES to group, assign, and revoke the correct privileges in a much easier way.

This is becoming even more important in MySQL with the advent of dynamic privileges.

What should we do to correctly use ROLES? Well first of all design.   …

When trying to make things better, make it very complicated.

I was working on a Security Threat Tool script when I had to learn more about the interaction between static and dynamic privileges in MySQL 8.

Dynamic privileges is a “new” thing added in MySQL 8 to easily extend the privileges definition, and at the same time to provide more granularity. For instance, the FLUSH operation now has dedicated Privileges and by scope. 

Dynamic privileges are assigned at runtime. Most of them are active when the server starts. But they can also change with respect to the components or plugin when activated. ( …

The practice of running databases in containers continues to grow in popularity.  As a Technical Account Manager at Percona, I get asked regularly about our Percona Distribution for MySQL Operator.  Additionally, I’m asked what I’m seeing in the industry in terms of adoption.  In most cases, the questions stem around new deployments.  Our DBaaS tool (currently in Technical Preview) makes launching a new cluster in a Kubernetes deployment trivial.  

Once the operator completes and verifies the setup, the UI displays the endpoint and credentials and you are on your way.  Voila!  You now have a cluster, behind a load balancer, that you can access from within your k8s cluster or …

In the previous release of our Percona Distribution for MySQL Operator, we implemented one interesting feature, which can be seen as “self-healing”: https://jira.percona.com/browse/K8SPXC-564.

I do not think it got enough attention, so I want to write more about this.

As it is well known, a 3-node cluster can survive a crash of one node (or pod, in Kubernetes terminology), and this case is very well handled by itself. However, if there is a problem with 2 nodes at the same time, this scenario is problematic for Percona XtraDB Cluster. Let’s see why this is a problem.

First, let’s review if the first node goes offline:

In this case, the cluster can continue work, because Node 1 and Node 2 figure out …

In my previous post Back From a Long Sleep, MyDumper Lives!, I told you that Fast Index Creation was in the queue and (after fixing several bugs) it will package in release 0.10.7 next month. But why am I so excited about it? Well, this feature opens new opportunities, what I’m going to call Restore Strategies.

In the Past…

In the past, the only option was to first restore the table definition and then insert the data rows in two simple steps. On tables with millions of rows, we already know why it takes more time as it inserts in the clustered index and in the secondary index, instead of building the secondary indexes after the data has been inserted, as myloader is able to do now. 

Nowadays, we have the option to do it, in …