Continuent Tungsten is one of the few all-in-one solutions for MySQL high availability. In this post I will show you how to automate the upgrade process using Ansible. I will walk you through the individual tasks and, finally, give you the complete playbook.

We will use a rolling approach, upgrading the slaves first, and finally upgrading the former master. There is no need for a master switch, as the process is transparent to the application.

I am assuming you are using the .ini based installation method. If you are still using staging host, I suggest you update your set up.

Pre tasks

The first step is ensuring the cluster is healthy, because we don’t want to start taking nodes offline unless we are sure the cluster is in good shape. One way of doing that is by using the built-in script tungsten_monitor. When we run the playbook, we only need to validate the cluster status on one node, so I am adding …

Getting the row count from mysql tables are not a big deal and even there is no need for a blog for this. Simply go and query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA and get the row count for the tables. But this is not your actual row counts. It’ll show the row count of the tables during the last statistics update. So if you want to track your tables growth then you should do select count(*) from table_name for all the tables and insert the results to somewhere. There are a lot of ways available. Im just make this as a blog post. So others can benefit from it.

Row Count - From Stored Procedure:

We’ll get the list of table names from the information_schema and use cursor to run select count(*) on that table and save the row count value to a table.

In this example, Im going to collect the row count of the tables from the database called …

We know you’ve been really looking forward to a glimpse of what to expect at Percona Live Austin, so here is the first sneak peek of the agenda!

Our conference committee has been reviewing hundreds of talks over the last few weeks and is delighted to present some initial talks.

• New features in MySQL 8.0 Replication by Luís Soares, Oracle OSS
• Shaping the Future of Privacy & Data Protection by Cristina DeLisle, XWiki SAS
• Galera Cluster New Features by Seppo Jaakola, Codership
• MySQL Security and Standardization at PayPal by Stacy Yuan &  Yashada Jadha, PayPal
• Mailchimp Scale: a MySQL Perspective by John Scott, Mailchimp
• The State of Databases in 2019 by Dinesh Joshi, Apache Cassandra

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 2.1.0 of its popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MariaDB and MySQL (brman).

The new FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager can be downloaded from here. How to install and use the Backup and Recovery Manager is describe in FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager (brman) installation guide.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager please report it to the FromDual Bugtracker or just send us an …

As I discussed in some of my recent talks at conferences (at the DOAG for example), MySQL 8 came out with new features which bring lots of improvements in terms of security.

“At-Rest” encryption has been existing from some releases by now:
– InnoDB Tablespace Encryption: by 5.7.11
– Redo and Undo Log Data Encryption: by 8.0.1
Now starting from version 8.0.14, you can also encrypt binary and relay log files. In this blog post we will see how to configure that and we will do some tests.

Case 1: Binary log files are not encrypted

Binary log files encryption is disables by default:

mysql> show variables like 'binlog_encryption';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| binlog_encryption | OFF   | …

As I discussed in some of my recent talks at conferences (at the DOAG for example), MySQL 8 came out with new features which bring lots of improvements in terms of security.

“At-Rest” encryption has been existing from some releases by now:
– InnoDB Tablespace Encryption: by 5.7.11
– Redo and Undo Log Data Encryption: by 8.0.1
Now starting from version 8.0.14, you can also encrypt binary and relay log files. In this blog post we will see how to configure that and we will do some tests.

Case 1: Binary log files are not encrypted

Binary log files encryption is disables by default:

mysql> show variables like 'binlog_encryption';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| binlog_encryption | OFF   | …

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 comes with enterprise grade total data encryption features. However, there is always the question of how much overhead – or performance penalty – comes with the data decryption. As we saw in my networking performance post, SSL under high concurrency might be problematic. Is this the case for data decryption?

To measure any overhead, I will start with a simplified read-only workload, where data gets decrypted during read IO.

During query execution, the data in memory is already decrypted so there is no additional processing time. The decryption happens only for blocks that require a read from storage.

For the benchmark I will use the following workload:

sysbench …

I have been managing multiple databases, mostly in Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL server, both on on-premise and cloud. We have faced a lot of challenging issues such as records deleted from a user table, backup file is corrupted, backup file is not compatible, backup files got deleted, backup storage is full and backup is running for long time, etc. When you are facing this issues for the first time, it is surprising to see new kind of issues every day and if you are not good in documentation, repetitive issues will keep occurring and we keep fixing rather than suctioning. If you are facing same challenges, then you need to focus on your backup and recovery strategy.

A well-designed backup and recovery strategy maximizes data availability and minimizes data loss without tolerating business requirement. In this post, we will discuss about the following topics:

1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
…

Recently we had encountered a strange issue with replication and temp directory(tmpdir) change while working for one major client.

All the servers under this were running with Percona flavor of MySQL versioned 5.6.38 hosted on a Debian 8(Jessie)

The MySQL architecture setup  is as follows one master with 5 direct slaves under it

Through this blog, we will take you through the issue we had faced and how we fixed ultimately.

Client Request:

There was a simple request from our client to add a column and index to a 16GB production table since the table had foreign keys, to avoid complications we decided to go with online DDL instead of pt-online-schema.

When we started to alter, it got failed due to insufficient space in “tmpdir”.MySQL by default would be using “/tmp” for temp table creating, sorting and other temp operation, Since we had only 5.7G left on the “/” …

I wanted to take a moment to write up a post on MariaDB MaxScale’s masking basics and include some real-world examples.

We have nice documentation on the subject, and Dipti wrote a nice blog post on it as well. I just wanted to provide my take on it, and hopefully build upon what is already there and offer some additional insights.

To provide a 50-foot overview, the masking filter makes it possible to obfuscate the returned value of a particular column.

3 quite common columns where this would be very beneficial: Social Security Number (“SSN”), Date of Birth (“DOB”), and Credit Card Number (“CCNUM”).

To use masking, it assumes you already have a MaxScale service up and running. For instance, the readwrite …