Following my post from a year ago https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/07/06/clickhouse-one-year/, I wanted to review what happened in ClickHouse during this year.
There is indeed some interesting news to share.

1. ClickHouse in DB-Engines Ranking. It did not quite get into the top 100, but the gain from position 174 to 106 is still impressive. Its DB-Engines Ranking score tripled from 0.54 last September to 1.57 this September

And indeed, in my conversation with customers and partners, the narrative has changed from: “ClickHouse, what is …

Starting with PMM 1.13,  PMM uses Prometheus 2 for metrics storage, which tends to be heaviest resource consumer of CPU and RAM.  With Prometheus 2 Performance Improvements, PMM can scale to more than 1000 monitored nodes per instance in default configuration. In this blog post we will look into PMM scaling and capacity planning—how to estimate the resources required, and what drives resource consumption.

We have now tested PMM with up to 1000 nodes, using a virtualized system with 128GB of memory, 24 virtual cores, and SSD storage. We found PMM scales pretty linearly with the available memory and CPU cores, and we believe that a higher number of nodes could be …

In my previous blog post, I showed how to deploy Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on Linode manually. It is pretty simple, but with a little coding it can be done even more easily using StackScripts

Here’s how:

1. Click on the “Add a Linode” and pick a Linode type you want to deploy.

2. Click on the deployed Linode and then click on the “Rebuild” Link

3. Click on Deploy Using StackScripts

4. On the resulting page search for “PMM” and pick PMMServer from PerconaLab.

5. Provide the host name for new Linode, pick the root password and click on “Rebuild”

6. Boot the server.

7.  You’re done. Wait for about 5 minutes for the installation to complete, then you can see PMM interface by going to this Linode …

Please join Percona’s Senior Consultant, Jervin Real, as he presents Migrating to AWS Aurora: A Checklist for Success. The event will take place on Tuesday, September 11th, 2018, at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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In the last few weeks, we have shown you how to successfully migrate from on-premise MySQL installations to AWS Aurora. What comes next is how to successfully ensure that your Aurora cluster performs and operates as you expect it to.

While …

One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution for system monitoring. Sometimes, though, you’ll have the need for a metric that’s not present in the list of node_exporter metrics out of the box. In this post, we introduce a simple method and show how to extend the list of available metrics without modifying the node_exporter code. It’s based on the textfile collector.

Enable the textfile collector in pmm-client

This collector is not enabled by default in the latest version of pmm-client. So, first let’s enable the textfile collector.

# pmm-admin rm linux:metrics
OK, removed system pmm-client-hostname from monitoring.
# pmm-admin …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018, as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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Nearly everyone today uses some form of database in the hosted cloud. You can use hosted MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, and PostgreSQL in several cloud providers as a database as a service (DBaaS).

In this webinar, Colin Charles explores how to efficiently deploy a cloud database configured for optimal performance, with a particular focus on MySQL.

You’ll learn the differences between the various public cloud offerings for Amazon RDS including Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Rackspace OpenStack …

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Forking or Branching – Lessons from the MySQL Community on Tuesday, August 28th, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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The MySQL Community offers a great example of various forks and branches, with MariaDB being the most well-known fork, and companies like Percona, Facebook and Alibaba maintaining their own branches.

In this presentation we will look at the history of MySQL, the causes of MySQL forking and branching, and …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Grading is underway for talks at Percona Live Europe 2018. I understand that by next week you will see the tutorial schedule released. As part of the program committee, I have enjoyed reviewing tutorials, and I reckon there is great competition for the schedule. I suggest you register now, and don’t forget to book your accommodation (need a discount?).

A video worth watching: …

If you are using large EBS GP2 volumes for MySQL (i.e. 10TB+) on AWS EC2, you can increase performance and save a significant amount of money by moving to local SSD (NVMe) instance storage. Interested? Then read on for a more detailed examination of how to achieve cost-benefits and increase performance from this implementation.

EBS vs Local instance store

We have heard from customers that large EBS GP2 volumes can be affected by short term outages—IO “stalls” where no IO is going in or out for a couple of minutes. Statistically, with so many disks in disk arrays (which back EBS volumes) we can expect frequent disk failures. If we allocate a very large EBS GP2 volume, i.e. 10Tb+, hitting such failure events can be common.

In the case of MySQL/InnoDB, such an IO “stall” will be obvious, particularly with the highly loaded system where MySQL needs to do physical IO. During the stall, you will see all write queries …