First I want to thank everyone who attended my May 21, 2020 webinar “How Safe is Asynchronous Master-Master Setup in MySQL?“. Recording and slides are available on the webinar page.

Here are answers to the questions from participants which I was not able to provide during the webinar.

Q: What do you generally think of hosting Relational Databases on VM’s as opposed to Bare metals?

A: With modern hardware and modern virtual machines this is absolutely possible. I know about many successful high loaded applications that run MySQL on VMs.

Just note that running a few VMs on a single physical machine may lead to resource loss rather than saving. For …

We are proud to announce that Percona was selected as a participating organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 program, this is our second year as a participating org with the GSoC program.

GSoC is a great program to involve young student developers in open source projects. We participated in the program in 2019 for the first time and we were really happy and satisfied with the results.
Percona Platform Engineering team decided to participate again for the 2020 program and we are glad and really happy to inform you that we were selected and welcome the student to work with our team during the summer of 2020 on their GSoC Project.

Preparations

We started planning for GSoC around November-December 2019, with the help from our Product Management team, we were able to shortlist a few ideas which we thought were really the right fit for …

In systems nowadays, improving security is a must! One of the weakest links in the security system is the user password from where an attacker can enter. In order to improve password strength and security, MySQL provides a plugin called “Validation plugin” which can be configured to enforce a set of rules for passwords.

Installation

The plugin can be enabled by executing the following at runtime:

INSTALL PLUGIN validate_password SONAME 'validate_password.so';

Or by adding the plugin in the configuration file, but this requires bouncing MySQL for it to take effect:

[mysqld]
plugin-load-add=validate_password.so

It’s also suggested to add the following variable in my.cnf so that the plugin cannot be removed at runtime (also requires a MySQL bounce to take effect):

[mysqld]
validate-password=FORCE_PLUS_PERMANENT

Checking Installation

Percona engineers often need to analyze and review complex SQL database queries. Good formatting can make these SQL queries much easier to understand and work with. Without clear formatting, queries can become confusing and hard to debug.

Online query formatting services provide one set of solutions. Examples are Code Beautify, FreeFormatter, and sqlformat.org. However, many users are not comfortable sharing their queries with third-party services, especially if your SQL code contains confidential information.

This article examines alternatives to online tools for SQL query formatting tools that have been successfully used by Percona engineers. These solutions come in different types:

1. Plug-ins to your code editor or …

This session at Percona Live ONLINE was presented by Akshay Suryawanshi, Senior Production Engineer at Shopify, and Jeremy Cole, Senior Staff Production Engineer – Datastores at Shopify.

Shopify is an online and on-premise commerce platform, founded in 2006. Shopify is used by more than a million merchants, and hundreds of billions of dollars of sales have happened on the platform since its inception. The company is a large user of MySQL, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekends are their peak dates during the year, handling hundreds of billions of queries with MySQL. This year’s presentation was an opportunity to talk about the company’s challenges and progress over the last twelve months.

Key Google Cloud concepts from the presentation

As part of the presentation, it’s important to understand the naming conventions that exist around …

MySQL, arguably the most popular relational database, is used pretty extensively at the popular professional social network LinkedIn. At Percona Live ONLINE 2020, the company’s flagship event held online for the first time due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Karthik Appigatla from LinkedIN’s database SRE team discussed the company’s approach to securing their database deployment without introducing operational hiccups or adversely affecting performance.

Instead of just performing admin duties, Karthik’s team builds automated tools to scale their infrastructure, and he talked about some of these tailored tools in his presentation. The database SREs on his team also work with the developers at LinkedIn and help them streamline their applications to make best use of the database.

Talking about LinkedIn’s reliance on MySQL, Karthik said that not only do all their infrastructural tools rely on MySQL, many of the internal …

Join Peter Zaitsev, CEO at Percona, as he discusses eBFT. eBPF is one of the most powerful instrumentation frameworks in modern Linux Kernel. In this presentation, we will cover eBPF basics as well as usage of Interactive eBPF tools, showing practical examples when and how they can help to resolve performance problems. Finally, we will look into Cloudflare’s ebpf_exporter and show how you can integrate eBPF with Prometheus for Long Term Monitoring.

Please join Peter Zaitsev, CEO at Percona, on Wednesday, June 10 at 11 am EDT for his webinar “Using eBPF for Linux Performance Analyses”.

Watch the Recording

If you can’t attend, sign up anyway and we’ll …

Long months of the pandemic lockdown have brought to life many great online events enabling the MySQL community to get together and stay informed about the very recent developments and innovations available to MySQL users. It isn’t over yet! Next Thursday, June 4th, Percona & ProxySQL are co-hosting the ProxySQL Tech Talks with Percona virtual meetup covering ProxySQL, MySQL and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

The attendees are invited to participate in the two-hour deep-dive event with plenty of time for questions and answers (we will have two 40-minute sessions + 20 minutes allocated for Q&A). Get prepared, come with your burning questions and true war stories – we’ll have our speakers answer and comment on them! And here come the speakers:

• René Cannaò, ProxySQL author and CEO of ProxySQL …

Here in Percona’s Training department, we like to think that we instruct our learners on the best practices for all things MySQL-related. In addition to performance tuning, query optimization, and replication configurations, another important topic is backups. Let’s dive in and discuss some of the basics and best practices around backups for MySQL.

Logical MySQL Backups

In MySQL, it is possible to take backups in two different forms. The first form, logical, is the most universal. Essentially, you create all of the necessary INSERT statements to repopulate your table data. The two most popular tools in the area are mysqldump and mydumper.

mysqldump

This tool has been around since the beginning and supports a slew of different options, too numerous to discuss in this post.

Here is a simple example for taking a logical backup of the …

Join Alkin Tezusal, Percona Technical Expert, as he covers the past, present, and future of MySQL as an Open Source Database. During this webinar he will discuss: * Use cases of MySQL as well as edge cases of MySQL topologies using real-life examples and “war” stories * How scalability and proxy wars make MySQL topologies more robust to serve webscale shops * Open-source tools, utilities, and surrounding MySQL Ecosystem

Please join Alkin Tezusal of Percona, on Thursday, June 4 at 10 am EDT for his webinar “MySQL Ecosystem in 2020”.

Watch the Recording

If you can’t attend, sign up anyway and we’ll send you the slides and recording afterward.