Percona Technical Account Managers get the privilege of working with some of our largest enterprise clients day in and day out.  As such, we get to really focus on how to best leverage our technology to generate measurable benefits for our users.  While it is fun to “nerd out” and always strive to use the latest and greatest, we need to stay focused on demonstrating business value and a genuine need.  Over the past few months, I’ve been working with one of my larger clients, Dropbox, along with our professional services team to validate the use of Percona Server for MySQL with the MyRocks storage engine over a large portion of their MySQL infrastructure.

Please note – this is not meant to be a deep dive into the technical details around …

It is no secret that compute and storage costs are the main drivers of cloud bills. Migration of data from the legacy data center to the cloud looks appealing at first as it significantly reduces capital expense (CapEx) and keeps operational expenses (OpEx) under control. But once you see the bill, the lift and shift project does not look that promising anymore. See Percona’s recent open source survey which shows that many organizations saw an unexpected growth around cloud and data.

Storage growth is an organic process for the expanding business: more customers store more data, and more data needs more backups and disaster recovery storage for low RTO.

Today, the Percona Innovation Team, which is part of the Engineering organization, is proud to announce a new feature – High Compression. With this feature enabled, …

Optimizing MySQL performance and troubleshooting MySQL problems are two of the most critical and challenging tasks for MySQL DBAs. The databases powering applications need to be able to handle changing traffic workloads while remaining responsive and stable in order to deliver an excellent user experience. Further, DBAs are also expected to find cost-efficient means of solving these issues.

In this webinar, we will demonstrate the advanced options of Percona Monitoring and Management V.2 that enable you to solve these challenges, which are built on free and open-source software. We will look at specific, common MySQL problems and review them.

Please join Peter Zaitsev on Wednesday, April 14th, 2021, at 11 am EDT for his webinar Optimize and Troubleshoot MySQL using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

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As many of you may remember, Percona added the super_read_only feature way back in Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.21, based on work done by WebScaleSQL. This feature eventually found its way into the Community branch of MySQL starting with 5.7.8, and it works the same in both cases. While this is now old news, over the last year I’ve had a couple of inquiries from clients around super_read_only usage in MySQL, and how it works in practice. While the usage of super_read_only is not complex, there is a small caveat that occasionally leads to some confusion around its use. As such, I thought it may be a good idea to write a quick blog post explaining this feature a bit more, and expanding on how it interacts with read_only.

What is super_read_only?

For those unfamiliar, what …

For MySQL, MyISAM and InnoDB storage engines are very popular. Currently, we are mostly using InnoDB engines for high reliability and high performance. Apart from those engines, we also have some other alternative engines and they have some nice features in them. In this blog, I am going to explain some of those engines, which I have listed below. 

• FEDERATED Storage Engine
• Merge or MRG_MyISAM Engine
• Blackhole Engine
• CSV Engine

FEDERATED Storage Engine Overview:

• FEDERATED Storage Engine allows you to access the data remotely without replication and cluster technologies. 
• Using the FEDERATED tables, you can scale your server load. Queries for the given table will be sent over the network to another MySQL instance. In this case, to scale the DB, you can use many MySQL instances without changing the application code.
• FEDERATED tables …

Have you ever wondered what it takes to complete Percona Server for MySQL (PS), Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and Percona XtraBackup (PXB) releases? 

Let’s step back just a minute and talk about what Percona stands for. We believe we “stand on the shoulders of giants.” This means we respect our upstream sources and work to add value to the base products. Over time, new functionality is added. Much of this value-add was implemented on the 5.7 series and pulled forward to the 8.0 series. Each time we receive an upstream release, we must reapply these features to the release we receive. This process is what we call the Merge Process. …

Transportable tablespaces were introduced in MySQL 5.6. Using this feature, we can directly copy a tablespace to another server and populate the table with data. This is a very useful feature for large tables. The transportable tablespace mechanism is faster than any other method for exporting and importing tables because the files containing the data just need to be copied to the target location using traditional Linux commands (cp, scp, rsync). Our post MySQL 5.6 Transportable Tablespaces best practices covers the best practices about transportable tablespaces. The feature also supports encrypted tablespaces, and in this article, I am going to explain how to use this feature with them.

Requirements

Below I am sharing my current setup and the requirements.

• I have two servers – s1 and s2. …

Starting a long time ago, we wanted to reproduce workload in a non-production environment, and there were different attempts to achieve that goal (Query Playback is just one of them). But there is another point of view, where you need to write your own workload to do so.

Both Have Pros and Cons

Reproduce Workload:

Pros:

• Simple to implement
• Ready to go

Cons:

• Need to rebuild the environment each time

Custom Scripts:

Pros:

• Possible to have a more realistic workload
• You can reuse the environment
• You can use Sysbench that allows you to change …

Due to CVE-2020-29488, Percona XtraBackup is modifying how xbstream handles absolute paths to prevent malicious file injections. Like the tar archiving utility, the new behavior removes the leading ‘/’ character and references to the parent directory.

Fixes are available in Percona XtraBackup versions:

>= 2.4.22

>= 8.0.23-16.0

For example, ../../../d1/../d2/h.txt will be saved in the stream with the relative path ./d2/h.txt.

The updated function provides a warning when creating a stream with a file with an absolute path:

$ xbstream -c /tmp/data

xbstream: Removing leading '/' from member names

The function also will not extract …

Lately, the number of questions about how to build Percona software has been increased. More and more people try to add their own patches, add some modifications, and build software by themselves. But this raises the question of how to do this in the same way as Percona does, as sometimes the compiler flag can make a drastic impact on the final binary.

First of all, let’s talk about the stages of compiling software.

I would say that at the beginning you need to prepare the build environment, install all the needed dependencies, and so on. For each version, the dependency list would be different. How do you get the correct dependency list? You can get all build requirements from the spec file (on rpm-based systems) or from the control file( on deb-based systems).

The next stage is to get the source code of Percona …