Percona Live Amsterdam is in 3 weeks, and on the evening of the second day of the conference (Tuesday October 4th 2016), there is the traditional Community Dinner.

As last year, Booking.com is hosting the event and as last year, canal boats will bring attendees from the conference venue to Booking.com headquarters.

This event involves some planning: Percona needs to arrange for canal boats and

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the MySQL default configuration changes between 5.6 and 5.7.

MySQL 5.7 has added a variety of new features that might excite you. However, there are also changes in the current variables that you might have overlooked. MySQL 5.7 updated nearly 40 of the defaults from 5.6. Some of the changes could severely impact your server performance, while others might go unnoticed. I’m going to go over each of the changes and what they mean.

The change that can have the largest impact on your server is likely

sync_binlog

. My colleague, Roel Van de Paar, wrote about this impact in depth in another blog post, so I won’t go in much detail.

Recently, I worked on a customer case where the customer needed to monitor the checksum via Nagios monitoring. The pmp-check-pt-table-checksum plugin from Percona Monitoring Plugins for MySQL achieves this goal. I thought it was worth a blogpost.

pmp-check-pt-table-checksum

 alerts you when the pt-table-checksum tool from Percona Toolkit finds data drifts on …

One of the things we have been working on for MySQL 8, is speeding up scans that read multiple records from a table or an index. Such scans benefit from reading the records in batches, so that they don’t get the overhead of latching data pages and navigating in the B-tree for every single record that is read.…

Starting with MySQL release 8.0.0, the source code is now commented using the Doxygen documentation generation tool.

This project is long overdue … it has been a very well-worn issue, or an ever recurring wish, for the last 10 years.

Well, not any more.…

This blog post discusses how you can protect your e-commerce database from a high traffic disaster.

Databases power today’s e-commerce. Whether it’s listing items on your site, contacting your distributor for inventory, tracking shipments, payments, or customer data, your database must be up, running, tuned and available for your business to be successful.

There is no time that this is more important than high-volume traffic days. There are specific events that occur throughout the year (such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Singles Day) that you know are going to put extra strain on your database environment. But these are the specific times that your database can’t go down – these are the days that can make or break your year!

So what can you do to guarantee that your database environment is up to the …

This is an unstable release, please don’t use in production.

It was rumored that the new MySQL version would be 8 and not as 5.8 as a lot of people thought, and it appears the rumors were true.

Below are some of the features that caught my eye at first glance:

Roles

Although password expiration was implemented 5.7, the newer version bring a set of collective privileges as a Role. No need to have to copy paste that massive GRANT command you had when creating new users.

UTF-8 as default Charset

This is not yet the default charset coming with the server, but utf8mb4 will be the main charset instead of latin1, and the default collation will change from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8mb4_800_ci_ai. The plan is to do that before General Availability.

Invisible Indexes

Giving an …

How InnoDB initializes AUTO_INCREMENT counters is actually not a bug, but a documented mechanism. There were some complaints and even people who lost data over this. To initialize an auto-increment counter after a server restart, InnoDB executes the equivalent of the following statement on the first insert into a table containing an AUTO_INCREMENT column. SELECT MAX(ai_col) FROM table_name FOR

On the MySQL Bugs website there are some tide stats available. These show rate of bug creation.

I've put them in a graph:

I made these with this IPython Notebook. There are more detailed graphs per version in the notebook.

Update: The version in the notebook now uses the same range for the Y axis and has a marker for the GA dates of each release.

A question which would come sometimes to mind when starting with MySQL is whether I should use DATETIME or TIMESTAMP data type since both appear to store same date and time component.


Similarities between datetime and timestamp:
1. Values contain both date and time parts.
2. Format of retrieval and display is "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS".
3. Can include a trailing fractional seconds part in up to microseconds (6 digits) precision.
4. With the fractional part included, the format for these values is "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS[.fraction]".
5. Both the TIMESTAMP and (as of MySQL 5.6.5) DATETIME offer automatic initialization and updating to the current …