Hello, all! Just a quick blog to remind you all about the Percona Live 2016 Community Game Night!

This awesome event is taking place on Wednesday, April 20 from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, after the Community Networking Reception. It’s modeled after last year’s extremely popular game night, featuring many of the same games back by popular demand:

• The Meltdown
• Segway Races
• Pac-Man Battle Royal!

This year we plan on tons more games compared to last year, with fun additions like a bowling alley and Oculus Rift experiences. We’ll have drinks, food and most importantly: some crazy good fun.

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In this blog, we’ll discuss MicroSoft’s recent announcement that SQL Server will be available on Linux. If you’re going to Linux, why not move from SQL Server to MySQL?

The open source operating system Linux powers nearly one-quarter of all the servers running in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Until just last week, this meant nearly one-quarter of Azure cloud servers couldn’t actually run much Microsoft software.

So Microsoft is porting SQL Server to Linux. Currently, there is a private preview available with a planned full release sometime in mid-2017.  Microsoft …

Following earlier posts on replication and query cache improvements, this article will focus on a feature that can make Aurora more suitable for mission critical enterprise applications: near-instantaneous crash recovery.

While real-life performance is tricky to measure and may be evaluated differently in the context of different applications, downtime is a fairly straightforward thing to define and you most certainly want to avoid it regardless of what kind of service you're running. Let's take Aurora for a spin and see how it can make your life easier in this area.

Introduction This article doesn't pretend to be even remotely close to a proper technical description of MySQL startup and crash …

In this blog, I will answer questions posed in my recent introduction to MySQL troubleshooting basic techniques webinar.

Thank you for attending my March 10 MySQL troubleshooting webinar “Introduction to MySQL troubleshooting: basic techniques,” which is the second in the “MySQL Troubleshooting Webinar” series. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Here is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses.

Q: Any known …

This is the second and last tutorial blog post on how to use pt-table-checksum / pt-table-sync tools for MySQL replication.

In the first post, I showed you how to use the

pt-table-checksum

  /

pt-table-sync

  tools in a typical MySQL replication setup. In this post, we’ll discuss MySQL replication for more advanced topologies. I will show you how to use these tools in a chained …

Following the recent post on replication performance and efficiency, I'd like to talk about another MySQL feature that has received some treatment in Aurora: the Query Cache.
We'll first discuss the limitations of "traditional" Query Cache implementation, we will then watch a sysbench read-only test take off and go from 250K reads per second to nearly 650K reads per second, all thanks to the improved Query Cache. Have fun!
Query Cache The MySQL Query Cache is a hugely useful feature that caches the result sets of SELECT statements in memory. It makes perfect sense in typical OLTP applications (especially web apps), where queries are quite repeatable because the same piece of data is often selected multiple times by many clients.
The following performance issues are associated with query cache implementation in vanilla …

In this blog post, we’ll be discussing Percona Server 5.7 performance improvements.

Starting from the Percona Server 5.6 release, we’ve introduced several significant changes that help address performance problems for highly-concurrent I/O-bound workloads. Some of our research and improvements were re-implemented for MySQL 5.7 – one of the best MySQL releases. But even though MySQL 5.7 showed progress in various aspects of scalability and performance, we’ve found that it’s possible to push I/O bound workload limits even further.

Percona Server 5.7.11 currently has two major performance features in this area:

• …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.3.4 on March 17th, 2016. Downloads are available from our download site or Percona Software Repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona XtraBackup drives down backup costs while providing unique features for MySQL backups.

This …

Introduction

• wait_timeout
• interactive_timeout
• net_read_timeout
• net_write_timeout

What do these timeouts do in MySQL? If you search the web for one or more of these, you may find complaints that no comprehensive explanation exists for all of these timeouts in one place (besides the obvious documentation of dynamic server system variables in MySQL). This blog post seeks to provide a central documentation source for timeouts and provide some practical explanation.

Knowing what timeouts do helps in a troubleshooting effort. It’s good to understand when an issue is timeout related and when it’s not, and to know the right reasons for changing timeout variables, or the right time to ask the developer or ad-hoc user to please tune the variables in the session, instead of …

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to use “plugin: auth_socket” to change user password in MySQL 5.7. In

In Debian/Ubuntu it is pretty common to install MySQL/Percona Server with an empty password for the root user. After everything is configured and tested, then a password is set. This is not a good practice in production servers (or soon-to-be production servers), but you can do it for your own test servers. With regards to authentication, things have changed a bit in 5.7, and methods that worked before now need a different procedure.

Let’s say that you install 5.7 and don’t specify a password. You will see the following:

SELECT User, Host, HEX(authentication_string) FROM mysql.user; …