It’s a few weeks after AWS re:Invent 2018 and my head is still spinning from all of the information released at this year’s conference. This year I was able to enjoy a few sessions focused on Aurora deep dives. In fact, I walked away from the conference realizing that my own understanding of High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), and Durability in Aurora had been off for quite a while. Consequently, I decided to put this blog out there, both to collect the ideas in one place for myself, and to share them in general. Unlike some of our previous blogs, I’m not focused on analyzing Aurora performance or examining the architecture behind Aurora. Instead, I want to focus on how HA, DR, and Durability are defined and implemented within the Aurora ecosystem.  We’ll get just deep enough into the weeds to be able to examine these capabilities alone.

Aurora MySQL – What is it?

We’ll start with a simplified …

ProxySQL 1.4.13, released by ProxySQL, is now available for download in the Percona Repository along with an updated version of Percona’s proxysql-admin tool.

ProxySQL is a high-performance proxy, currently for MySQL and its forks (like Percona Server for MySQL and MariaDB). It acts as an intermediary for client requests seeking resources from the database. René Cannaò created ProxySQL for DBAs as a means of solving complex replication topology issues.

The ProxySQL 1.4.13 source and binary packages available at https://percona.com/downloads/proxysql …

It seems, that this is a question that regularly shows up in forums or stackoverflow.

To start, let’s highlight the fact that in MySQL 8.0 it’s not any more possible to create a user directly from the GRANT command (ERROR 1410 (42000): You are not allowed to create a user with GRANT).

This means that to grant some privileges, the user must be created first.

Let’s create a user ‘user1‘ with ‘ChangeMe‘ as password that the user will have to change:

mysql> create user 'user1' identified by 'ChangeMe' password expire;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (1.35 sec)

Let’s try to connect to MySQL using that new created user:

$ mysql -u …

Here are routines that can handle date arithmetic on BC dates, Julian day functions, and simulation of Oracle's support of old-style-calendar dates -- including simulation of an Oracle bug. So the routines are good for extending the range of useable dates, compact storage, and import/export between DBMSs that have different rules.

If you need to refresh your understanding of dates, read our old-but-lovely article first: The Oracle Calendar.

I wrote the main routines with standard SQL so they should run on
any DBMS that supports the standard, but tested only with
MySQL and MariaDB. (UPDATE on 2019-02-04: corrections were needed with HSQLDB, see the comments.)

ocelot_date_to_julianday

  Return number of days since 4713-01-01, given yyyy-mm-dd [BC] date

ocelot_date_validate

  Return okay or error, given yyyy-mm-dd BC|AD date …

I am getting ready to hit the road for the first time in 2019.  And the first stop is Belgium.

PHP Benelux is the first stop January 25 & 26, 2019 in Antwerp.  This is my firs time to this show but I have heard others rave about it for years and I am looking for to this show.

Next is an event on February 1st that is quickly filling up. The Pre-FOSDEM MySQL Day   Come hear session from the MySQL Engineering Teams, some other great technical speakers, and talk to them!  Great event but please reserve your space ASAP as this is a very popular event!
…

If you’re integrating your Node.js service with MySQL, you probably want to execute queries.

I’ve seen a fair bit of ugly code to do this, often using callbacks. I thought I would share some of my own patterns here. Maybe this is useful to others to read.

I don’t typically use ORM’s. If you’re already happy with sequalize, this article is probably not for you.

Prequisites

The most popular NPM package for MySQL is mysql, but I use the mysql2 package instead.

The mysql2 package is also very popular, but has a few advantages. The advantage I care about is support for promises. The authors of this package have actually teamed up with the authors of the mysql package to …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.13 for January 9, 2019.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced open source command-line tools, developed and used by the Percona technical staff, that are engineered to perform a variety of MySQL®, MongoDB® and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually. With over 1,000,000 downloads, Percona Toolkit supports Percona Server for MySQL, MySQL®, MariaDB®, Percona Server for MongoDB and MongoDB.

Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source. You can download packages  …

In less than a month, on February 2–3, the largest open source conference in Europe, FOSDEM, will take place in Brussels. The MySQL Engineering Team will of course attend and present. Here’s a short overview of our sessions. If you want to talk to us about something, or if you just want to listen and learn, this is where you’ll find us:

Friday

On February 1, the day before FOSDEM, we make an early start with a Pre-FOSDEM MySQL Day.…

One of the most exciting features Amazon Aurora Serverless brings to the table is its ability to go to sleep (pause) when idle. This is a fantastic feature for development and test environments. You get access to a powerful database to run tests quickly, but it goes easy on your wallet as you only pay for storage when the instance is paused.

You can configure Amazon RDS Aurora Serverless to go to sleep after a specified period of time. This can be set to anywhere between five minutes and 24 hours

For this feature to work, however, inactivity has to be complete. If you have so much as a single query or even maintain an idle open connection, Amazon Aurora Serverless will not be able to pause.

This means, for example, that pretty much any monitoring you may have enabled, including our own …

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2019 in North America has moved to Austin, Texas: a cool place to be, and host to many big names in the tech space. Read what Dave Stokes, MySQL Community Manager for Oracle, has to say in favor of Austin.

If you need a conference ticket for Austin, put in your proposal now!

Those who are successful with their presentation or tutorial submissions will receive a pass to the full three days of the event. Closing date for the call for papers is Sunday, January 20.

Percona is adopting an industry trend by organizing the conference into 13 separate tracks …