MySQL 8.0 GA is right around the corner. I don't have precise information about its release, as I don't work at Oracle. If I did, I would probably know, but I couldn't tell when the release is scheduled to appear because of company policies. I can, however, speculate and infer, based of my experience with previous releases. My personal assessment is that the release will appear before 9:00am PT on April 24, 2018. The "before" can be anything from a few minutes to one week in advance.
Then, again, it may not happen at all if someone finds an atrocious bug that needs to be fixed asap.

Either way, users are keen on testing the new release in its current state of release candidate. Here I show a few methods that allow you to have a taste of the new …

In this blog post, we’ll show that you can plot MySQL data in real time using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

In my previous blog post, I showed how we could load into any metrics, benchmarks into MySQL and visualize it with PMM. But that’s not all! We can even visualize most any kind of data from MySQL in real time. I am falling in love with the MySQL plugin for Grafana — it just makes things so easy and smooth.

This graph shows us the number of visitors to a website in real …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to migrate to Amazon RDS using Percona XtraBackup.

Until recently, there was only one way to migrate your data from an existing MySQL instance into a new RDS MySQL instance: take and restore a logical backup with mysqldump or mydumper. This can be slow and error-prone. When Amazon introduced Amazon Aurora MySQL, you could use Percona XtraBackup to take an online physical backup of your database and restore that into a new Aurora instance. This feature is now available for RDS MySQL as well. Using Percona XtraBackup instead of a logical backup can save a lot of time, especially …

dbdeployer went into release candidate status a few weeks ago. Since then, I added no new features, but a lot of tests. The test suite now runs 3,000+ tests on MacOS and a bit more on Linux, for a grand total of 6,000+ tests that need to run at least twice: once with concurrency enabled and once without. I know that testing can't prove the absence of bugs, but I am satisfied with the results, since all this grinding has allowed me to find several bugs and fix them.

In this framework, I felt that dbdeployer could exit candidate status and get to version 1.0. This happened on March 26th. An immediate side effect of this change is that from this point on, dbdeployer must adhere to the semantic versioning principles:

A version number is made of Major, Minor, and Revision. When changes are applied, the following happens:

…

In this blog post, we’ll look at the performance of multi-source replication with GTID.

Multi-Source Replication is a topology I’ve seen discussed recently, so I decided to look into how it performs with the different replication concepts. Multi-source replication use replication channels, which allow a slave to replicate from multiple masters. This is a great way to consolidate data that has been sharded for production or simplify the analytics process by using the same server. Since multiple masters are taking writes, care is needed to not overlook the slave. The traditional replication concept uses the binary log file name, and the position inside that file.

This was the standard until the release of global transaction identifiers (GTID). I have set up a test environment to validate which concept would perform better, and be a better choice for use in this topology.

SETUP

My test suite …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.10 on March 30, 2018. This release is based on MySQL 5.7.19. You can download it from our download site and apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how you can analyze MySQL audit logs (Percona Server for MySQL) with ClickHouse and ClickTail.

Audit logs are available with a free plugin for Percona Server for MySQL (https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/LATEST/management/audit_log_plugin.html). Besides providing insights about activity on your server, you might need the logs for compliance purposes.

However, on an active server, the logs can get very large. Under a sysbench-tpcc workload, for …

In this blog post, we’ll look at using ProxySQL and VIRTUAL columns to solve ORM issues.

There are a lot of web frameworks all around. Programmers and web designers are using them to develop and deploy any website and web application. Just to cite some of the most famous names: Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Symfony, etc.

Web frameworks are very useful tools. But sometimes, as with many human artifacts, they have issues. Any framework has its own queries to manage its internal tables. While there is nothing wrong with that, but it often means these queries are not optimized.

Here is my case with Symfony 2 on MySQL 5.7, and how I solved it.

The sessions table issue

Symfony has a table to manage session data for users on the application. The table is defined as follow:

CREATE TABLE …

Introduction

In this article we will explore one approach for deploying ProxySQL behind a load balancer in Google Cloud.

While considering the deployment of ProxySQL, one has basically the following options:

1. Install ProxySQL on existing application server(s)
2. Provision dedicated ProxySQL server(s) between your application servers and the database layer.

Each approach has its pros and cons, but if there’s a significant number of application servers (more than a dozen or so) having a dedicated ProxySQL “layer” can be a more attractive option, specially if there is no service discovery mechanism in place (e.g. Consul).

Let’s consider a simple scenario, with a master and a small number of slaves in a single geographic region. Assuming that you are following the best practice, your database servers should be split into different availability zones. So for ProxySQL, it also …

Today on the show, I am joined by my colleagues, John Schulz and Valerie Parham-Thompson. Both John and Valerie just returned from the MariaDB Conference in New York City. As MariaDB is a native, relative and viable option to MySQL, I thought that it would be a good time to delve into the platform in detail and share what we have discovered with you here today. In this episode, we find out more about the MariaDB Conference – why it was founded, what the attendance was like and who the Conference is beneficial for. We then take a closer look at MariaDB and investigate the key differences between MariaDB and MySQL – highlighting MariaDB’s newest and most user-friendly features. We also learn more about other software platforms, such as Percona and Oracle, and how they compare to MariaDB. Our insightful guests continue to offer some helpful tips and resources for anyone getting started in MariaDB. So, if you are currently using MySQL or MariaDB, …