If you’re a DBA, one of your “easiest” tasks is to stop/start MySQL during a maintenance window, but even that could lead to unwanted scenarios if you modify some dynamic parameters at some point in your instance.

Here’s a brief story of how this could happen, to make it clearer:

You’re a DBA managing a few MySQL servers. The application using one of them starts having issues on a Friday night, right before it’s time to leave; after a quick check, you notice the app is requesting more connections, and the hotfix is to up max connections; you change them dynamically, the fire is off, and so are you. Let your future self worry about finding the root cause and fixing it properly the following Monday.

But life happens; Monday is here with new challenges, and you already forgot about the connections issue… A few months later, a restart for MySQL is required, and surprise, surprise, right after …

In the world of data backup and security, physical backups play an extremely important role. Physical backup methods are faster than logical because they involve only file copying without conversion. This type of backup is suitable for large, important databases that need to be recovered quickly when problems occur.

Physical backups are the backups that consist of raw copies of the directories and files that store database contents. In addition to databases, the backup can include any related files, such as log or configuration files. Now, since backup speed and compactness are important for busy, important databases, Percona’s open source physical backup solution – Percona XtraBackup (PXB), takes into account all these aspects and benefits MySQL world with its exceptional capabilities!

This blog post will walk you through how PXB …

To reduce the backup size, save storage space, and speed up the backup and restore process, you can compress a backup with Percona XtraBackup. The XtraBackup --compress option makes XtraBackup compress all output data, including the transaction log file and metadata files, with one of the supported compression …

On July 18th, Oracle released its first pair of MySQL LTS and Innovation releases. (For more, check out A Quick Peek at MySQL 8.0.34 and MySQL 8.1.0.) These releases were announced several months ago and gradually detailed closer to the release date. Today, we know from Oracle’s official blog post what to expect, as well as what the cadence and scope of the upcoming releases will be.

So, the next immediate question that comes to mind is: Is Percona going to follow the same release pattern as “upstream“ MySQL?

The short answer is “yes.”

We are proud to say that over the last several years, Percona delivered on its promise of providing the MySQL community a …

In this blog post, we will describe the improvements to Percona XtraBackup 8.0.33-28 (PXB), which significantly reduces the time to prepare the backups before the restore operation. This improvement in Percona XtraBackup significantly reduces the time required for a new node to join the Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC).

Percona XtraDB Cluster uses Percona XtraBackup to do SST (State Snapshot Transfer) from one node to another. When a new node joins the cluster, SST is performed to receive the data from DONOR to the JOINER. JOINER uses PXB to stream the data directory from DONOR. JOINER must prepare the backup before using it. It is observed that when the DONOR has a huge number of tablespaces (one million),  XtraBackup on JOINER …

When it comes to backups, there are several options for saving backup files. You can choose to save them locally on the same server, stream them to different servers, or store them in object storage. Percona XtraBackup facilitates streaming through the use of an auxiliary tool called xbcloud.

STDOUT Datasink

This diagram displays the process of streaming a backup to object storage utilizing the current STDOUT datasink:

• XtraBackup spawns multiple copy threads. Each one will be reading a chunk of data from a specific file.
• Each copy thread will write the chunk of data to a pipe (aka STDOUT).
• Xbcloud will have a red thread that will be responsible for reading each chunk of data from STDIN. This chunk will be uploaded to object storage utilizing an async request, and a callback will be added to an …

This blog was originally published in January 2022 and was updated in July 2023.

Working with hundreds of different customers, I often face similar problems around running queries. One very common problem when trying to optimize a database environment is index usage. A query that cannot use an index is usually a long-running one, consuming more memory or triggering more disk iops.

A very common case is when a query uses a filter condition against a column that is involved in some kind of functional expression. An index on that column can not be used.

Starting from MySQL 8.0.13, functional indexes are supported. In this article, I will first explain an overview of indexes in MySQL and cover the MySQL CREATE INDEX before diving into showing what functional indexes are and how they work.

Introduction to MySQL Indexes

Recently, I was working on a very unfortunate case that revolved around diverging clusters, data loss, missing important log errors, and forcing commands on Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Even though PXC tries its best to explain what happens in the error log, I can vouch that it can be missed or overlooked when you do not know what to expect.

This blog post is a warning tale, an invitation to try yourself and break stuff (not in production, right?).

TLDR:
Do you know right away what happened when seeing this log?

2023-06-22T08:23:29.003334Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-000000] [Galera] gcs/src/gcs_group.cpp:group_post_state_exchange():433: Reversing history: 171 -> 44, this member has applied 127 more events than the primary component.Data loss is possible. Must abort.

Demonstration

Using the …

MySQL Shell is an advanced client and code editor for MySQL. In addition to the provided SQL functionality, similar to MySQL, MySQL Shell provides scripting capabilities for JavaScript and Python and includes APIs for working with MySQL. The X DevAPI enables you to work with both relational and document data, and MySQL Shell 8.0 is highly recommended for use with MySQL Server 8.0 and 5.7.

MySQL Shell includes utilities for working with MySQL. To access the utilities from within MySQL Shell, use the util global object, which is available in JavaScript and Python modes, but not SQL mode. These are the utilities to take a backup; let’s see some basic commands.

• util.dumpTables – Dump one or more tables from single database
• util.dumpSchemas – Dump one or more databases
• util.dumpInstance – Dump full instance
• util.loadDump – Restore dump

1. Single table …

In Percona Managed Services, one key aspect of managing the databases is configuring backups. Percona XtraBackup is one of the best tools for performing physical database backups.

It is a good practice to compress the backups to save costs on storage and to encrypt the backups so those can’t be used if the files are compromised as long as you keep your encryption keys safe!

Percona XtraBackup supports both compression and encryption of the backups. When the data is too big (tens of TB and more), the backups can take several hours or even days to complete. In order to speed up the backup process along with the compression and encryption, we can use multiple threads. We can specify the number of threads to be used for each operation (copy, compression, …