In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the Troubleshooting Slow Queries webinar.

First, I want to thank you for attending the April 28 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: I’ve heard that is a bad idea to use

select *

; what do you recommend?

A: When I used

SELECT *

 in my slides, I wanted to underline the idea that sometimes you need to select all columns from the …

Percona is glad to announce the new release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on May 20, 2016. Binaries are available from the downloads area or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.29-25.15 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.29-76.2
• …

This year at Etsy, we spun up a “Database Working Group” that talks about all things data. It’s made up of members from many teams: DBA, core development, development tools and data engineering (Hadoop/Vertica). At our last two meetings, we started talking about how many “sources of information” we have in our environment. I hesitate to call them “sources of truth” because in many cases, we just report information to them, not action data based on them. We spent a session whiteboarding all of of these sources and drawing the relationships between them. It was a bit overwhelming to actually visualize the madness.

A few examples:

• We use Chef for configuration management and Chef knows about all database server. It made sense for us to build out our monitoring to generate Nagios configuration based on that data from Chef. When …

In this blog post, we’ll discuss fixing MySQL scalability problems using either ProxySQL or thread pool.

In the previous post I showed that even MySQL 5.7 in read-write workloads is not able to maintain throughput. Oracle’s recommendation to play black magic with

innodb_thread_concurrency

 and

innodb_spin_wait_delay

 doesn’t always help. We need a different solution to deal with this scaling problem.

All the conditions are the same as in my previous run, but I will use:

• ProxySQL limited to 200 connections to MySQL. ProxySQL has a capability to multiplex incoming connections; with this setting, even with 1000 connections to the proxy it will …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.49-37.9 on May 19, 2016. Based on MySQL 5.5.49, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.49-37.9 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series.

Percona Server is open-source and free. Details of the release can be found in the 5.5.49-37.9 milestone on Launchpad. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Bugs …

Some time ago, I published the article “AWS Aurora Benchmarking - Blast or Splash?”. In which I was analyzing the behavior of different solutions using synchronous replication in AWS environment.

After I published it, I received a lot of comments and feedback, from the community and from Amazon engineers.

Given that I had decide to perform another round of tests, keeping into account the comments received and the suggestions.

I had presented some of the results during the Percona conference in Santa Clara last April 2016. The following is the transposition into an article of that presentation with more details.

{autotoc enabled=yes}

Why new test?

Very good question, with an easy answer. …

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to find the MySQL 5.7 root password.

While new MySQL software security features are always welcome, they can impact use and performance. Now by default, MySQL 5.7 creates a password for the root user (among other changes) so the installation itself can be considered secure. It’s a necessary change, but it has confused some customers and users. I see a lot of people on social networks (like Twitter) asking about this change.

Where is my root password?

The answer depends on the way you have installed MySQL 5.7 or Percona Server 5.7. I am going to show where to find the password depending on the installation method and the distribution used. For all these examples, I assume this is a new installation and you are using the default my.cnf.

Centos/Redhat – …

Please join Alexander Rubin, Percona Principal Consultant, for his webinar MongoDB administration for MySQL DBA on Thursday, May 19 at 10 am PDT (UTC-7).

If you are a MySQL DBA and want to learn MongoDB quickly – this webinar is for you. MySQL and MongoDB share similar concepts so it will not be hard to get up to speed with MongoDB.

In this talk I will explain the following MongoDB administration concepts:

• Day to day operations for MongoDB
• Storage engines and differences with MySQL storage engines
• Databases, collections and documents
• Replication in MongoDB and the difference with MySQL replication
• Sharding in MongoDB
…

In this post, we’ll look at the results from some MySQL 5.7 read-write benchmarks.

In my past blogs I’ve posted benchmarks on MySQL 5.5 / 5.6 / 5.7 in OLTP read-only workloads. For example:

• MySQL 5.7 sysbench OLTP read-only results: is MySQL 5.7 really faster?
• MySQL 5.7 primary key lookup results: is it really faster?
• ProxySQL versus MaxScale for OLTP RO workloads

Now, it is time to test some read-write transactional workloads. I will again use sysbench, and my scripts and …

A few weeks ago my friend Frank de Jonge told me he managed to improve an import into a MySQL server down from more than 10 hours to 16 minutes. According to him it had to do with several field types (too long fields to really small data), the amount of indexes, and constraints on the tables. We were talking about 1 million records here. He wondered if it was possible to make it even faster.

The basics

Turns out there are many ways of importing data into a database, it all depends where are you getting the data from and where you want to put it. Let me give you a bit more context: you may want to get data from a legacy application that exports into CSV to your database server or even data from different servers.

If you are pulling data from a MySQL table into another MySQL table (lets assume they are into different servers) you might as well use …