This blog discusses new features about the persisted system variables and how we can use it to make variable changes persistent. The MySQL server maintains system variables that control its operations. The dynamic variables used prior to the MySQL 8 release are not persistent and are reset upon restart. These variables can be changed at runtime using the SET statement to affect the operation of the current server instance but we have to manually update my.cnf config file to make them persistent. In many cases, updating my.cnf from the server-side is not a convenient option, and leaving the variable just updated dynamically reverts on the subsequent restart without any history.

Persisted system variables are one of the useful features introduced in MySQL 8. The new functionality helps DBAs update the variables dynamically and register them without touching the configuration files from the server-side.

How to Persist the Global …

MySQL 8.0.22 was released on Oct 19, 2020, and came with nice features and a lot of bug fixes. Now, you can configure your async replica to choose the new source in case the existing source connection (IO thread) fails. In this blog, I am going to explain the entire process involved in this configuration with a use case.

Overview

This feature is very helpful to keep your replica server in sync in case of current source fails. 

To activate asynchronous connection failover, we need to set the “SOURCE_CONNECTION_AUTO_FAILOVER=1” on the “CHANGE MASTER” statement.

Once the IO connection fails, it will try to connect the existing source based on the “MASTER_RETRY_COUNT, MASTER_CONNECT_RETRY”. Then only it will do the failover. 

The feature will only work when the IO connection is failed, maybe the source crashed or stopped, or any network failures. This will not work if the replica is …

Hello everyone, in this little post we will review a new feature in MySQL 8.

What is “CHECK Constraint”?

This is a new feature to specify a condition to check the value before INSERT or UPDATE into a row. The constraint could return an error if the result of a search condition is FALSE for any row of the table (but not if the result is UNKNOWN or TRUE).

This feature starts working on MySQL 8.0.16, and in previous versions, we could create it, but it doesn’t work, meaning the syntax is supported but it is not working,

There are some rules to keep in mind…

– AUTO_INCREMENT columns are not permitted
– Refer to another column in another table is not permitted
– Stored functions and user-defined functions are not permitted (you can not call a function or any user-defined functions)
– Stored procedure and function parameters are not permitted (you cannot call …

Maybe one of the more “obscure” operations when dealing with replica lag, or, in general, when one needs to control writes to the database, is the Rate limit. It’s also lately one of the most popular conversations around the community.

But what is it? In plain words: holding up queries for a while, giving air to the replicas to breath and catch up. Something similar to the Galera’s Flow Control mechanism, although flow control, when it kicks in, stops all the writes while the nodes catch up. With a throttle no write is stopped, just delayed.

There are several ways to do this. A popular tool is Freno but this is also something that can be achieved with ProxySQL. Let’s see how.

Delay

ProxySQL has a variable called …

One of the questions you often will be faced with operating a Linux-based system is managing memory budget. If a program uses more memory than available you may get swapping to happen, oftentimes with a terrible performance impact, or have Out of Memory (OOM) Killer activated, killing process altogether.

Before adjusting memory usage, either by configuration, optimization, or just managing the load, it helps to know how much memory a given program really uses.

If your system runs essentially a single user program (there is always a bunch of system processes) it is easy.  For example, if I run a dedicated MySQL server on a system with 128GB of RAM I can use “used” as a good proxy of what is used and “available” as what can still be used.

root@rocky:/mnt/data2/mysql# free -h …

Have you ever had to provision a large number of instances from a single backup? The most common use case is having to move to new hardware, but there are other scenarios as well. This kind of procedure can involve multiple backup/restore operations which can easily become a pain to administer. Let’s look at a potential way to make it easier using Percona Xtrabackup. The Percona XtraBackup tool provides a method of performing fast and reliable backups of your MySQL data while the system is running.

Leveraging Named Pipes

As per the Linux manual page, a FIFO special file (a named pipe) is similar to a pipe except that it is accessed as part of the filesystem. It can be opened by multiple processes for reading or writing.

For this …

Disclaimer: the following script only works for Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, and relies on enabling performance schema (PS) instrumentation which can add overhead on high concurrent systems, and is not intended for continuous production usage as it’s a POC (proof of concept).

Introduction

In Percona Support, we frequently receive tickets related to deadlocks and even though the deadlock concept is simple, troubleshooting might not be in all cases. 

As explained in How to Deal with MySQL Deadlocks, a deadlock occurs when two or more transactions mutually hold and request for locks, creating a cycle of dependencies. MySQL will detect deadlocks and kill one of the transactions (making it rollback), and the deadlock will be printed in SEIS (show engine innodb status). Limitations of using this approach …

Rewriting a MySQL query for performance is an important process that every DBA should be aware of so they can fix the wrong queries on runtime without code changes on the application end. ProxySQL has great support for rewriting the queries, which Alkin Tezuysal already explored in his excellent blog ProxySQL Query Rewrite Use Case.

So far, MySQL community provides two built-in query rewrite plugins to perform this task. Recently they introduced the plugin “ddl_rewriter”.

• query rewriter plugin : It has support for INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE / REPLACE statements from MySQL 8.0.12. 
• ddl_rewritter plugin: It supports the CREATE TABLE statement. Introduced at MySQL 8.0.16.

In this blog, I am going to explain the complete process of the implementation and the …

At the Percona engineering team, we often receive requests to analyze changes in MySQL/Percona Server for MySQL behavior from one version to another, either due to regression or a bug fix (when having to point out to a customer that commit X has fixed their issue and upgrading to a version including that fix will solve their problem).

In this blog post, we will analyze the approach used to fix PS-7019 – Correct query results for LEFT JOIN with GROUP BY.

Each release comes with a lot of changes. For example, the difference between MySQL 8.0.19 to 8.0.20:

git diff mysql-8.0.19..mysql-8.0.20 | wc -l
737454
git diff mysql-8.0.19..mysql-8.0.20 --name-only | wc -l
4495

737K lines in 4495 files have changed from one minor version to another.

git …

A small thing that provides a huge help.

The other day I was writing some code to process a very large amount of items coming from a social media API. My items were ending in a queue in MySQL and then needed to be processed and eventually moved.

The task was not so strange,  but what I have to do is to develop a queue processor.  Now when you need to process a queue you have two types of queue: static and dynamic.

The static comes in a batch of N number of items in a given time interval and is normally easier to process given you have a defined number of items that you can split in chunks and process in parallel.

The dynamic is… well… more challenging. One option is to wait to have a predefined number of items, and then process them as if they were a static queue.

But this approach is not very good, given it is possible that it will delay a lot …