It has been some time since I have posted updates to my plugins.  After the initial version, I decided to split the plugins into categories of metrics.  This will allow users to choose whether they want to install all of the plugins or only select ones they care about.

Since the installation process is unfamiliar to many users, I also expanded the instructions to make it a little easier to follow.  Moreover, I added a Makefile.

I have also reformatted the output of some plugins to be either horizontal or vertical in orientation.  There is still more work to do in this area as well.

Where to Get The MySQL Plugins

You can get the plugins from GitHub at https://github.com/toritejutsu/osmetrics but they will have to be compiled from source.  As mentioned above, you can choose whether to install all of them or one by …

In previous TAM Enterprise Experiences posts, we have outlined typical aspects of utilizing MySQL in an Enterprise environment. One thing we have not yet covered is the topic of database encryption, both from the standpoint of business requirements as well as some of the more technical aspects of encryption.

In this post, we will cover:

• Common enterprise compliance requirements
• Types of MySQL encryption
• Choosing the right encryption
• Vault

Common Compliance Requirements

Beyond the obvious security concerns with sensitive data, most enterprise businesses also need to meet various compliance requirements, with the compliance requirement(s) dependent on the country the business is located in, the type of business, and the type of data being stored. Note that in all cases, the onus is on the business to protect the data based on these compliance requirements. Some of …

Earlier in November, we had a chance to present the “Google Cloud Platform: MySQL at Scale with Reliable HA.” We discussed different approaches to hosting MySQL in Google Cloud Platform with the available options’ pros and cons. This webinar was recorded and can be viewed here at any time. We had several great questions, which we would like to address and elaborate on the answers given during the webinar.

Q: What is your view on Cloud SQL High Availability in Google Cloud?

A: Google Cloud SQL provides High Availability through regional instances. If your Cloud SQL database is regional, it means that there’s a standby instance in another zone within the same region. Both instances (primary and standby) are kept synced through synchronous replication on the persistent …

A lot of elements take part in a good backup strategy. Two of them are:

• Where to store your backups – Never on the same server. Preferable not in the same datacenter. Ideally far enough so you can restore in case of a natural disaster (region flood, extended local power outage, etc…).
• Retention period – The longer, the better.

Those points relate directly to costs. Storing a backup on an off-site facility cost money. Keeping the backups available to fulfill your retention period policy costs money.

The main cloud providers have different layers of storage often called Storage Class. Each layer has its own particularities and policies, but they come with an important factor – Cost!

We are happy to announce that starting at …

MySQL 5.7, alongside other many improvements, brought bulk load for creating an index (WL#7277 to be specific), which made ADD INDEX operations much faster by disabling redo logging and making the changes directly to tablespace files. This change requires extra care for backup tools. To block DDL statements on an instance, Percona Server for MySQL implemented LOCK TABLES FOR BACKUP. Percona XtraBackup (PXB) uses this lock for the duration of the backup. This lock does not affect DML statements.

MySQL 5.7 doesn’t have an option to block an instance against DDL and to allow all MDL’s. Thus, Percona XtraBackup has also implemented –lock-ddl-per-table. Before we go into other details, let’s understand how –lock-ddl-per-table works up to now:

1. PXB …

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 …

As you may know, MySQL 5.6 will reach EOL (“End of Life”) in February 2021. This means in about two months, there will be no more updates, and more importantly, no more security fixes for discovered vulnerabilities.     

You may be well ahead of the curve and have already updated to MySQL 5.7 or MySQL 8.0, or even better, migrated to Percona Server for MySQL, or maybe not. Perhaps it takes more time than anticipated to adjust your application to be compatible with MySQL 5.7 or higher, or maybe you planned to decommission your application, but life got in the way. Now the EOL date is looming, and there is just no way to decommission your last MySQL 5.6 instance in time.

We have great news for our MySQL Luddites! Percona is pleased to …

Getting MySQL working with self-signed SSL certificates is pretty simple. Having it working with a certificate signed by a trusted authority is also very simple, we just need to set the correct path and privileges to the file. The problem comes when we need to make MySQL validate the certificate signature against the authority public key.

I’ve searched on the internet but wasn’t able to find much information about it. There are a good number of posts on how to set up your own certificate authority and self-sign your certificates, but not much about how to use one signed by a public trusted authority.

I used a certificate signed by a Let’s Encrypt on my tests but the concepts and steps shared here should work for any public trusted authority. I also generated one certificate to be used by MySQL server and another one to be used by the client. It is possible to use the …

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:

…