Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what you require and a plan on how to evaluate potential vendors. When time is also a factor a working knowledge of the internal buying processes and expectations of your employer are also important.

The wide variety of similar sounding products with hard to distinguish feature differentiators can be daunting. In order to get the right software at a competitive price within the desired timeframe there are 4 important things to consider.

Here’s the short list:

• Define requirements by focusing on needs instead of features
• Prepare your budget, know your buying process
• Check provider quality and support
• Make the most of your trial period

And here’s the longer one: …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how to execute a MySQL single table Point-In-Time Recovery.

I recently wrote a blog post describing a different way of doing Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR). If you want to know the step by step, please visit the mentioned blog post. Here is a quick summary of the approach:

1. Restore the backup on the desired server
2. Create a fake master
3. Copy all relevant binlogs to the fake master
4. Configure server from the first step as a slave from a fake master

In addition to the above steps, there is a similar approach …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.39-26.25 (PXC) on February 26, 2018. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.39-26.25 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.6.39
• Galera/Codership WSREP API Release 5.6.39
• Galera Replication library 3.23

Starting from this release, Percona XtraDB …

Please join Percona’s Build / Release Engineer, Mykola Marzhan, as he presents Monitoring Amazon RDS with Percona Monitoring and Management on February 27, 2018, at 7:00 am PST (UTC-8) / 10:00 am EST (UTC-5).

Register Now

Are you concerned about how you are monitoring your AWS environment? Keeping track of what is happening in your Amazon RDS deployment is key to guaranteeing the performance and availability of your database for …

The ability to restore MySQL logical backups is a significant part of disaster recovery procedures. It’s a last line of defense.

Even if you lost all data from a production server, physical backups (data files snapshot created with an offline copy or with Percona XtraBackup) could show the same internal database structure corruption as in production data. Backups in a simple plain text format allow you to avoid such corruptions and migrate between database formats (e.g., during a software upgrade and downgrade), or even help with migration from completely different database solution.

Unfortunately, the restore speed for logical backups is usually bad, and for a big database it could require days …

Welcome to the first interview blog for the upcoming Percona Live 2018. Each post in this series highlights a Percona Live 2018 featured talk that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post highlights Bryana Knight, Platform Engineer at GitHub. Her talk is titled Scaling a High-Traffic Database: Moving Tables Across Clusters. Facing an immediate need to distribute load, GitHub came up with creative ways to move a significant amount of traffic off of their main MySQL cluster – with no user impact. In our conversation, we …

If you want to have a look on what is about to come in the new version of the popular database and is used to Syntax Highlighting you don’t need to be chained to the Terminal.

Some of you may use tools like MySQL Workbench or Sequel Pro (as of the release of this post both tools had the following error occurring), and even if you are using the Terminal (if you are using an old version of mysql​, like 5.7) you may encounter this error:

Unable to connect to host 127.0.0.1, or the request timed out.

Be sure that the address is correct and that you have the necessary privileges, or try increasing the connection timeout (currently 10 seconds).

MySQL said: Authentication plugin ‘caching_sha2_password’ cannot be loaded: …

Recently we faced an issue where the config management software had automatically upgraded the mariadb-server-10.1 package to the latest 10.1.31 version. This upgrade broke the galera cluster setup for this installation.

I’ve started to recreate this issue in my local lab setup and I managed to reproduce this problem.

I have created a 3 node galera setup: galera1 (192.168.55.100), galera2 (192.168.55.101) and galera3 (192.168.55.102). All 3 servers run MariaDB-10.1.30. Galera replication is working fine.

This is the basic galera config:

# cat /etc/mysql/conf.d/cluster.cnf
#########################################################
# Galera config
#########################################################

[mysqld]
wsrep_on                                  = ON
wsrep_provider                            = /usr/lib/libgalera_smm.so
wsrep_provider_options                    =
wsrep_cluster_name                        = …

In Amazon space, any EC2 or Service instance can “disappear” at any time.  Depending on which service is affected, the service will be automatically restarted.  In EC2 you can choose whether an interrupted instance will be restarted, or left shutdown.

For an Aurora instance, an interrupted instance is always restarted. Makes sense.

The restart timing, and other consequences during the process, are noted in our post on Aurora Failovers.

Aurora Testing Limitations

As mentioned earlier, we love testing “uncontrolled” failovers.  That is, we want to be able to pull any plug on any service, and see that the environment as a whole continues to do its job.  We can’t do that with Aurora, because we can’t control the essentials:

• power button;
• reset switch;
…

This is part-4 of the Maxscale Blog series

1. Maxscale and Galera
2. Maxscale Basic Administration
3. Maxscale for Replication

Maxscale started supporting Amazon Aurora lately from its version 2.1 which comes with a BSL license, we are good until we use only 3 nodes, …