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: …

Oracle recently released Read Replica for MySQL Database Service (also known as MySQL HeatWave, with or without the use of HeatWave accelerator for OLTP and OLAP).

Read Replicas are read-only copies of the MySQL DB system in the same region. When you add Read Replicas, they are automatically distributed accross Availability Domains and/or Fault Domains.

Each MySQL DB instance can have up to 18 read replicas.

Read Replicas use MySQL Asynchronous Replication with parallel workers. And when you create the first Read Replica, a Read Replica Load Balancer is created, which distributes read traffic among the read replicas.

Not all shapes are compatible with Read Replicas, the …

If you are using MyDumper as your Logical Backup solution and you store your backups on S3, you need to take a local backup and then upload it to S3. But what if there is not enough space to hold the backup on the server where we are taking the backup? Even if we have enough disk space, we will need to wait until the end to start to upload the files, making the whole process longer.

MyDumper implemented stream backup in v0.11.3 and we have been polishing the code since then. We also implemented two ways of executing external commands:

−−exec-per-thread: The worker that is getting the data from the database will write and redirect to the STDIN of the external command. It will be similar to execute cat FILE | command per every written and closed file.

−−exec: In this case, the worker writes in the local storage and when the file is closed, the filename is enqueued. The exec …

In this blog post, I will try to cover a few dump and data-loading utilities offered by MySQL Shell.

What is MySQL Shell?

It is a robust client and code editor for MySQL. In addition to having APIs for dealing with MySQL, MySQL Shell offers scripting capabilities for JavaScript and Python. It provides an AdminAPI to manage MySQL servers and create InnoDB Cluster and ReplicaSet deployments. It supports an X DevAPI to work on both SQL and NoSQL interfaces via the X Protocol. Finally, it provides utilities to make working with MySQL in Python and Javascript mode easier.

Now, let’s jump into some practical stuff and see what these tools offer us.

Dump Utility

In the dump utility, there are three tools: util.dumpInstance(), util.dumpSchemas(), and util.dumpTables () so let’s discuss them one by one. 

1.  “util.dumpInstance()” – This was introduced in MySQL Shell 8.0.21 and …

Next week, November 16th, I will participate to the MySQL Innovation and Cloud Virtual Day in French.

My colleagues will present what’s new in MySQL 8.0.31 and also summarize all the big news that was announced at Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas.

Attendees will learn about the MySQL HeatWave offering in OCI.

I will be presenting something that is only available in MySQL on-prem and in OCI as a managed service: MySQL Document Store.

The event is in French and attendees will have the opportunity to discuss and chat with MySQL experts (included Olivier!!) during the event.

Registration is required to attend this free event: Register Here.

On se voit la semaine prochaine !

Recently, I wrote three articles on how to analyze queries and generate a slow query log for MySQL Database Service on OCI:

• https://lefred.be/content/analyzing-queries-in-mysql-database-service/
• https://lefred.be/content/analyzing-queries-in-mysql-database-service-slow-query-log-part-1/
• https://lefred.be/content/analyzing-queries-in-mysql-database-service-slow-query-log-part-2/

In these post, we were generating a slow query log in text or JSON directly in Object Storage.

Today, we will see how we can generate …