The choice of good InnoDB primary keys is a critical performance tuning decision. This post will guide you through the steps of choosing the best primary key depending on your workload.

As a principal architect at Percona, one of my main duties is to tune customer databases. There are many aspects related to performance tuning which make the job complex and very interesting. In this post, I want to discuss one of the most important one: the choice of good InnoDB primary keys. You would be surprised how many times I had to explain the importance of primary keys and how many debates I had around the topic as often people have preconceived ideas that translate into doing things a certain way without further thinking.

The choice of a good primary key for an InnoDB table is extremely important and can have huge performance impacts. When you start working with a customer using an overloaded x1.16xlarge RDS instance, with close …

Please join Percona Senior MySQL DBA for Managed Services, Dov Endress, as he presents XA Transactions on Wednesday, July 25th, 2018 at 12:00 PM PDT (UTC-7) / 3:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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Distributed transactions (XA) are becoming more and more vital as applications evolve. In this webinar, we will learn what distributed transactions are and how MySQL implements the XA specification. We will learn the investigatory and debugging techniques necessary to ensure high availability and data consistency across disparate environments.

This webinar is not intended to be an in-depth look at transaction managers, but focuses on resource managers only. It is primarily intended for database administrators and site reliability engineers.

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Welcome to the third part of this series. I’m glad you’re still reading, as hopefully this means you find this subject interesting at least. Previously we presented the first two components of MySQL InnoDB Cluster: Group Replication and MySQL Router and now we will discuss the last component, MySQL Shell.

MySQL Shell

This is the last component in the cluster and I love it. Oracle have created this tool to centralize cluster management, providing a friendly, command-line based user interface.

The tool can be defined as an advanced MySQL shell, which is much more powerful than the well known MySQL client. With the capacity to work …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents as he presents MariaDB 10.3 vs. MySQL 8.0 on Wednesday, July 18th, 2018, at 9:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 12:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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Technical considerations

Are they syntactically similar? Where do these two databases differ? Why would I use one over the other?

MariaDB 10.3 is on the path of gradually diverging from MySQL 8.0. One obvious example is the internal data dictionary currently under development for MySQL 8.0. This is a major change to the way metadata is stored and used within the server, and MariaDB doesn’t have an equivalent feature. Implementing this feature could mark the end of datafile-level compatibility between …

If you’re reading consumer SSD reviews and using them to estimate SSD performance under database workloads, you’d better stop. Databases are not your typical consumer applications and they do not use IO in the same way.

Let’s look, for example, at this excellent AnandTech review of Samsung 960 Pro –  a consumer NVMe device that I happen to have in my test lab.

The summary table is actually great, showing the performance both at Queue Depth 1 (single threaded) as well as Queue Depth 32 – a pretty heavy concurrent load.

Even at QD1 we see 50K (4K) writes per second, which should be enough for pretty serious database workloads.

In reality, though, you might be in for some disappointing surprises. While “normal” buffered IO is indeed quite fast, this drive really hates fsync() calls, with a single thread …

MySQL InnoDB Cluster is an Oracle High Availability solution that can be easily installed over MySQL to provide high availability with multi-master capabilities and automatic failover. In the previous post we presented the first component of InnoDB Cluster, group replication. Now we will go through the second component, MySQL Router.  We will address MySQL Shell in a final instalment of this three-part series. By then, you should have a good overview of the features offeed by MySQL InnoDB Cluster.

MySQL Router

This component is responsible for distributing the traffic between members of the cluster. It is a proxy-like solution to hide cluster topology from applications, so applications don’t …

Amazon RDS Aurora (MySQL) provides its own low latency replication. Nevertheless, there are cases where it can be beneficial to set up replication from Aurora to an external MySQL server, as Amazon RDS Aurora is based on MySQL and supports native MySQL replication. Here are some examples of when replicating from Amazon RDS Aurora to an external MySQL server can make good sense:

• Replicating to another cloud or datacenter (for added redundancy)
• Need to use an independent reporting slave
• Need to have an additional physical backup
• Need to use another MySQL flavor or fork
• Need to failover to another cloud and back

In this blog post I will share simple step by step instructions on how to do it.

Steps to setup MySQL replication from AWS RDS Aurora to MySQL server

1. Enable binary logs in the option group in Aurora (Binlog format = mixed). This will …

In this post we will review the most important Linux settings to adjust for performance tuning and optimization of a MySQL database server. We’ll note how some of the Linux parameter settings used OS tuning may vary according to different system types: physical, virtual or cloud. Other posts have addressed MySQL parameters, like Alexander’s blog MySQL 5.7 Performance Tuning Immediately After Installation. That post remains highly relevant for the latest versions of MySQL, 5.7 and 8.0. Here we will focus more on the Linux operating system parameters that can affect database performance.

Server and Operating System

Here are some Linux parameters that you should check and consider modifying if you need to improve database performance.

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Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist Colin Charles on Thursday, June 28th, 2018, as he presents Securing Database Servers From External attacks at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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A critical piece of your infrastructure is the database tier, yet people don’t pay enough attention to it judging by how many are bitten via poorly chosen defaults, or just a lack understanding of running a secure database tier. In this talk, I’ll focus on MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, and cover external authentication, auditing, encryption, SSL, firewalls, replication, and more gems from over a decade of consulting in this space from Percona’s 4,000+ …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Escalation Specialist Sveta Smirnova as she presents Troubleshooting Best Practices: Monitoring the Production Database Without Killing Performance on Wednesday, June 27th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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During the MySQL Troubleshooting webinar series, I covered many monitoring and logging tools such as:

• General, slow, audit, binary, error log files
• Performance Schema
• Information Schema
• System …