Database schema is not something that is written in stone. It is designed for a given application, but then the requirements may and usually do change. New modules and functionalities are added to the application, more data is collected, code and data model refactoring is performed. Thereby the need to modify the database schema to adapt to these changes; adding or modifying columns, creating new tables or partitioning large ones. Queries change too as developers add new ways for users to interact with the data - new queries could use new, more efficient indexes so we rush to create them in order to provide the application with the best database performance.

So, how do we best approach a schema change? What tools are useful? How to minimize the impact on a production database? What are the most common issues with schema design? What tools can help you to stay on top of your schema? In this blog post we will give you a short overview of how …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Escalation Specialist Sveta Smirnova as she presents Troubleshooting Best Practices: Monitoring the Production Database Without Killing Performance on Wednesday, June 27th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

During the MySQL Troubleshooting webinar series, I covered many monitoring and logging tools such as:

• General, slow, audit, binary, error log files
• Performance Schema
• Information Schema
• System …

In the previous article we researched MySQL Client / Server Protocol using WireShark. Now lets start to write our codes in python to simulate MySQL native client. Ready codes are here: Github repo

First of all we have to create MYSQL_PACKAGE class. MYSQL_PACKAGE class is the parent of all other package classes (HANDSHAKE_PACKAGE, LOGIN_PACKAGE, OK_PACKAGE and etc.)

class MYSQL_PACKAGE: “””Data between client and server is exchanged in packages of max 16MByte size.”””    def __init__(self, resp= b”):       self.resp = resp       self.start =0       …

I’ve been posting quite a bit about Docker as I’ve been working with it a lot as of late. I thought I would share something interesting I discovered a couple weeks ago while working on setting up a Docker container-based lab environment for training purposes here at Pythian, specifically when attempting to install the MySQL-python package inside the container.

I know what you’re thinking: why is he trying to install a package in a Docker container? Doesn’t that go against the “Docker run and forget about it” philosophy? Sure, but in this case, I’m looking to add orchestration via ansible, which I don’t think is completely out of the question in order to coordinate your Docker containers for something like replication. This requires using the …

Kubernetes, and its most popular distribution OpenShift, receives a lot of interest as a container orchestration platform. However, databases remain a foreign entity, primarily because of their stateful nature, since container orchestration systems prefer stateless applications. That said, there has been good progress in support for StatefulSet applications and persistent storage, to the extent that it might be already comfortable to have a production database instance running in Kubernetes. With this in mind, we’ve been looking at running Percona XtraDB Cluster in Kubernetes/OpenShift.

While there are already many examples on the Internet of how to start a single MySQL instance in Kubernetes, for serious usage we need to provide:

• High Availability: how can we guarantee availability …

In my previous blog post, I had described the steps to perform an in-place upgrade for upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0. In this blog post, I will discuss about the considerations that needs to be taken into account while upgrading to MySQL 8.0

The general in-place upgrade requirement is that MySQL 8.0 will understand the disk image produced by MySQL 5.7. …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Tuesday, June 26th, 2018, as he presents MariaDB Server 10.3 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

MariaDB Server 10.3 is out. It has some interesting features around system versioned tables, Oracle compatibility, column compression, an integrated SPIDER engine, as well as MyRocks. Learn about what’s new, how you can use it, and how it is different from MySQL.

Register Now

Colin Charles Chief Evangelist

Colin Charles is the Chief Evangelist at Percona. He was previously on the founding team of MariaDB Server in 2009, and had …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.12 on June 22, 2018. You can download it from our download site and apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that …

MySQL Client / Server protocol is used in many areas. For example:

• MySQL Connectors like ConnectorC, ConnectorJ and etc.
• MySQL proxy
• Between master and slave

What is MySQL Client / Server protocol?

MySQL Client / Server protocol is accepted conventions (rules). Through these rules client and server “talks” and understand each other. Client connects to server through TCP connection with special socket, sends to server special packets and accepts them from server. There are two phases of this connection:

• Connection phase
• Command phase

Next illustration describes phases:

STRUCTURE OF PACKETS

Each packet consists of valuable data types. Maximum length of each packet can be 16MB. If the length of packet is more than 16MB, then it is separated into several chunks (16MB). First of all let’s see the protocol data types. …

I’m just back from a trip in Barcelona where I presented MySQL 8.0 InnoDB Cluster (at dataops and Barcelona MySQL Meetup) and the majority of feedback was great, but I also had some comments on the demos I showed. The first one was:

This is a joke of course (maybe it’s true for some), people found it very easy and they liked it.

But then, the second one was that all I showed wasn’t easy to find, some people who already played with the solution didn’t succeeded in creating a cluster so easily… not because they had errors or encountered bugs, but more because they just didn’t know how to do it.

The goal of this …