In this new series of articles we will explore the different sources of information available when using MySQL Database Service on OCI to effectively perform your daily DBA job.

Of course there is way less things to take care of, like backups, upgrades, operating system and hardware maintenance, …

But as a serious DBA, you want to know the status of all this and maintain some control.

Some information is available on OCI’s webconsole and some in Performance_Schema and Sys.

If you use MySQL Shell for Visual Studio Code, you have the possibility to see an overview of your server using the Performance Dashboard:

But today we will take a look at the backup, a very important responsibility of the DBA.

When you use MySQL Database Service on OCI, you can define the backup policy at the DB Instance’s creation. You can always modify it later:

In …

Let’s look at how you can run Percona databases on Kubernetes, the easy way.

Chances are that if you are using the latest Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) version, you have seen the availability of the new Percona Database as a Service (DBaaS). If not, go and get a glimpse of the fantastic feature with our docs on DBaaS – Percona Monitoring and Management.

Now, if you like it and wanna give it a try! (Yay!), but you don’t wanna deal with Kubernetes, (nay)o worries; we have a tool for you. Introducing the Percona DBaaS Infrastructure Creator, or Percona My Database as a Service (MyDBaaS).

My Database as a Service

…

Public cloud spending is slowing down. Quarter-over-quarter growth is no longer hitting 30% gains for AWS, Google, and Microsoft. This is businesses’ response to tough and uncertain macroeconomic conditions, where organizations scrutinize their public cloud spending to optimize and adjust.

In this blog post, we will see how running databases on Kubernetes with Percona Operators can reduce your cloud bill when compared to using AWS RDS.

Inputs

These are the following instances that we will start with:

• AWS
• RDS for MySQL in us-east-1
• 10 x db.r5.4xlarge
• 200 GB storage each

The cost of RDS consists mostly of two things – compute and storage. We will not consider data transfer or backup costs in this article.

• db.r5.4xlarge – $1.92/hour or …

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 16! Documentation improvements # In this release the maintainer team has decided to put an emphasis on reviewing, editing, and rewriting the website documentation to be current with the code. With help from CNCF, we have also improved the search experience. We welcome feedback on the current incarnation of the docs. GA announcements # We are marking VDiff v2 as Generally Available or production-ready in v16.

Recently, I was working with my colleagues Edwin Wang and Taras Onishchuk and found an interesting edge case involving a situation where a replica running Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, external to AWS Aurora instance version 2.10.2 (5.7-compatible), broke. I recreated the issue in my lab with a simple create database statement, as you will see below.

Error 'Character set '#255' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/percona-server/charsets/Index.xml' file' on query. Default database: 'lab'. Query: 'create database test'

The interesting thing to note here is the character set ‘#255’. You won’t see this available if you check the list of available collations in Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 for the UTF8MB4 character set.

mysql> SHOW COLLATION WHERE Charset = 'utf8mb4' and id = 255; 
Empty set (0.01 sec)

…

Amazon instance profiles are used to pass IAM roles to an EC2 instance. This IAM role can be queried using EC2 instance metadata to access an S3 bucket. Please check Amazon’s Official Documentation for more information.

Today we are happy to announce that starting with Percona XtraBackup 8.0.31-24, xbcloud can read instance metadata and fetch credentials from an instance profile, utilizing it to authenticate against an S3 bucket. Xbcloud is a tool part of Percona XtraBackup and allows you to upload and download backups to Amazon S3 storage.

How it works

Configure your EC2 instance …

How can we fix a nasty out-of-space issue leveraging the flexibility of Percona Operator for MySQL?

When planning a database deployment, one of the most challenging factors to consider is the amount of space we need to dedicate to data on disk.

This is even more cumbersome when working on bare metal, as it is more difficult to add space when using this kind of solution with respect to the cloud.

When using cloud storage like EBS or similar, it is normally easy(er) to extend volumes, which gives us the luxury to plan the space to allocate for data with a good grade of relaxation. 

Is this also true when using a solution based on Kubernetes like Percona Operator for MySQL? Well, it depends on where you run it. However, if the platform you choose supports the option to extend volumes, K8s per se gives you the …

Recently I came across an interesting investigation about long-running transactions getting killed on an Aurora Reader instance. In this article, I will explain why it is advisable to avoid long-running transactions on Aurora readers when executing frequent DDL operations on the Writer, or at least be aware of how a DDL can impact your Aurora readers.

Aurora uses a shared volume often called a cluster volume that manages the data for all the DB instances which are part of the cluster. Here DB instances could be a single Aurora instance or multiple instances (Writer and Aurora Read Replicas) within a cluster.

Aurora replicas connect to the same storage volume as the primary DB instance and support only read operations. So if you add a new Aurora replica it would not make a new copy of the table data and instead will connect to the shared cluster volume which contains all the data.

This could lead to an issue on replica …

I wrote this post on MyRocks because I believe it is the most interesting new MySQL storage engine to have appeared over the last few years. Although MyRocks is very efficient for writes, I chose a more generic workload that will provide a different MyRocks use case.

The use case is the TPC-C benchmark but executed not on a high-end server but on a lower-spec virtual machine that is I/O limited like for example, with AWS EBS volumes. I decided to use a virtual machine with two CPU cores, four GB of memory, and storage limited to a maximum of 1000 IOPs of 16KB. The storage device has performance characteristics pretty similar to an AWS gp2 EBS volume of about 330 GB in size. I emulated these limits using the KVM iotune settings in my lab.

<iotune>
     <total_iops_sec>1000</total_iops_sec>
     <total_bytes_sec>16384000</total_bytes_sec> …

Operators hide the complexity of the application and Kubernetes. Instead of dealing with Pods, StatefulSets, tons of YAML manifests, and various configuration files, the user talks to Kubernetes API to provision a ready-to-use application. An Operator automatically provisions all the required resources and exposes the application. Though, there is always a risk that the user would want to do something manual that can negatively affect the application and the Operator logic.

In this blog post, we will explain how to limit access scope for the user to avoid manual changes for database clusters deployed with Percona Operators. To do so, we will rely on Kubernetes Role-based Access Control (RBAC).

The goal

We are going to have two roles: …