I think it is often confusing to compare upstream MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL, and some helpful information can be found in the introductory notes. But what does that really mean for an ordinary DBA, especially if none of the known big extra features are important in a particular use case?

In this article, I would like to start a series of short blog posts highlighting small, often less known, but potentially useful features, available in Percona Server for MySQL. Let’s start with a relatively new feature.

Limit the disk space used by binary logs problem

Historically, dealing with binary logs and the disk space used by them was quite challenging. The only thing that let you control this is the …

Author: Robert Agar

The working life of a DBA is often centered on optimizing their systems to provide users with the best performance. There are many aspects of a MySQL implementation that can be tuned to increase its functionality. These improvements will result in a more efficient system and enhanced user experience.

One of the problems facing the DBA responsible for instituting performance tuning is to identify the particular areas to address that will impact the system in a positive manner. Approaching this task in a haphazard fashion is not advisable. Randomly modifying parameters is just as likely to cause further issues than to lead to performance gains. Luckily, there is a solution to this dilemma.

Conducting focused monitoring can be instrumental in enabling the DBA to pinpoint the source of performance degradation. Armed with this knowledge, informed decisions can be made regarding how …

Introduction In this article, we are going to test the MySQL 8 implementation of custom SQL CHECK constraints. Although the CHECK clause is a standard SQL feature, prior to MySQL 8.0.16, the clause was parsed and ignored, so this functionality could only be emulated via BEFORE INSERT and UPDATE triggers. Custom SQL CHECK constraints As I explained in this article, custom SQL CHECK constraints are very useful to ensure non-nullability constraints for JPA entity subclass-specific attributes when using the SINGLE TABLE JPA inheritance strategy. To understand the problem, consider we have the... Read More

The post MySQL 8 support for custom SQL CHECK constraints appeared first on Vlad Mihalcea.

Great SaaS – starts with great software. My company has been working on this mission since 2004.

It took a few years to get our solution right – to offer a geo-distributed MySQL database backend for billion-dollar businesses. And it took a few more years to polish it.

Today, we continue to improve it day-in, day-out.

But there is no doubt the patience and perseverance pays off:

While the number of Tungsten-clustered databases in-production is in the thousands, we average only one (1) new support request per day, and, because of this, we provide an average response time less than three (3) minutes.

Not enough is said about the people and values behind great software; so that’s what I want to talk about here. Continuent is an agile, globally-distributed, remote team that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our software helps global enterprises …

There could be various requirements at application end which need realtime slaves. Let me introduce a solution to a problem we used to face how can we monitor whether our slaves are real time or they are lagging in Milliseconds. Unfortunately there is no built in feature in MySQL to get Replication Lag in MilliSeconds.
Perhaps there is a tool provisioned in pt-toolkit named as pt-heartbeat. It generates heartbeat events on master and monitoring system can monitor time difference on slave to calculate lag.
How to deploy pt-heartbeat in your environment (Assuming OS as UBUNTU xx.xx):

Step 1: …

In week 3 of our series, Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog), we discuss how to identify and analyze problematic SQL queries using SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL. If you missed it, feel free to read our previous post on Agentless Monitoring and Cloud Readiness.

Find Problematic SQL Queries

MySQL and MariaDB currently lack advanced tools for profiling SQL queries (such as SQL Profiler of Microsoft’ SQL Server). While other monitoring tools for MySQL and MariaDB provide monitoring and advisory information on various system metrics, they do not pinpoint the problematic SQL queries. No amount of hardware upgrades and tuning of the parameters in the database server configuration file ‘my.cnf’ and the database server initialization file …

Ran into an interesting situation trying to configure a MySQL JDBC driver to connect over TLS (though the driver may call it SSL, TLS is the name for more recent versions of the protocol).

The error I was getting was pretty generic:

Communications link failure The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server.

With the relevant parts of the stacktrace, also being non helpful:

at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.exceptions.SQLError.createCommunicationsException(SQLError.java:174)
        at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.exceptions.SQLExceptionsMapping.translateException(SQLExceptionsMapping.java:64)
        at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.createNewIO(ConnectionImpl.java:835)
        at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.(ConnectionImpl.java:455)
        at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.getInstance(ConnectionImpl.java:240)
        at …

MySQL has added a lot of functionality for Geographical Information System (GIS) data in the last two releases. This has given us better ways to save and explore GIS data. MySQL Workbench is an amazing tool that many do not realize has vastly upped its game for supporting GIS information.  But did you know you can use MySQL Workbench with OpenStreetMap to plot locations?

1. Get your Longitude and Latitude
These, believe it or not, is the hard part.  Go to  https://www.latlong.net/ and type in the name of your location.  It will report back your longitude and your latitude.  For the example I will be using the information for the city of Justin, Texas.

The CTO has issued the decree: “We are moving to the cloud!”  Great, so now what do we do? When it comes to migrating from on-premise to the cloud, there are many factors to consider and decisions that need to be made.  First (and probably most important) on that list: managed DBaaS or setup and manage our own infrastructure?

Type of Cloud

Managed DBaaS options are great but come with some limitations.  The main two questions that should be considered here are around staff/experience and current architecture/database design.  In cases where there is a very limited database (or operations) team, a DBaaS is a great choice. Much of the operational infrastructure is already in place with general best practices in place.  However, a big tradeoff comes around flexibility. In cases where the current infrastructure is complex (for reasons right or wrong), a DBaaS is definitely the wrong choice as you will be …

It’s bad practice to provide world-writable access to critical files in Linux, though we’ve seen time and time again that this is done to conveniently share files with other users, applications, or services. But with Xtrabackup, preparing backups could go wrong if the backup configuration has world-writable file permissions.

Say you performed a backup on a MySQL instance configured with data-at-rest encryption using the keyring plugin. On the backup directory, the generated backup-my.cnf contains these instructions to load this plugin that will be used by Xtrabackup while preparing the backup:

backup-my.cnf

[mysqld]
innodb_checksum_algorithm=crc32
innodb_log_checksum_algorithm=strict_crc32
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:12M:autoextend
innodb_log_files_in_group=2
innodb_log_file_size=1073741824
innodb_fast_checksum=false
innodb_page_size=16384
innodb_log_block_size=512
innodb_undo_directory=./
innodb_undo_tablespaces=0 …