Recently, I’ve been working with a customer to evaluate the different cloud solutions for MySQL. In this post I am going to focus on maintenance windows and requirements, and what the different cloud platforms offer.

Why is this important at all?

Maintenance windows are required so that the cloud provider can do the necessary updates, patches, and changes to our setup. But there are many questions like:

• Is this going to impact our production traffic?
• Is this going to cause any downtime?
• How long does it take?
• Any way to avoid it?

Let’s discuss the three most popular cloud provider: AWS, Google, Microsoft. These three each have a MySQL based database service where we can compare the maintenance settings.

AWS

When you create an instance you can define your maintenance window. It’s a 30 minutes block when AWS can update and restart …

We discussed in our previous blogs about the MySQL-related dashboards. We highlighted the things that a DBA can benefit from by studying the graphs, especially when performing their daily routines from diagnostics, metric reporting, and capacity planning. In this blog, we will discuss the InnoDB Metrics and the MySQL Performance Schema, which is very important especially on monitoring InnoDB transactions, disk/cpu/memory I/O, optimizing your queries, or performance tuning of the server.

This blog touches upon the deep topic of performance, considering that InnoDB would require extensive coverage if we tackle its internals. The Performance Schema is also extensive as it covers kernel and core parts of MySQL and storage engines.

Let’s begin walking through the graphs.

MySQL InnoDB Metrics

This dashboard …

Schema change is one of the crucial tasks in MySQL with huge tables. Schema change can cause locks.

What is gh-ost?

                         gh-ost is a triggerless online schema change for MySQL by Github Engineering .It produces light workload on the master during the schema changes . We need online schema change to alter a table without downtime (locking) in production.pt-online schema change is the most widely used tool for making changes in the tables.gh-ost is just an alternative to pt-online schema change.

Why we have to use gh-ost?

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PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

While much of the team is working on longer-term projects, we were able to provide the following feature:

• MySQL and PostgreSQL support for all cloud DBaaS providers – Use PMM Server to gather Metrics and Queries from remote instances!
• Query Analytics + Metric Series – See Database activity alongside queries
• Collect local metrics using node_exporter + textfile …

Very often, database performance is affected by the inability to cache all the required data in memory. Disk IO, even when using the fastest devices, takes much more time than a memory access. With MySQL/InnoDB, the main memory cache is the InnoDB buffer pool. There are many strategies we can try to fit as much data as possible in the buffer pool, and one of them is data compression.

With regular MySQL, to compress InnoDB data you can either use “Barracuda page compression” or “transparent page compression with punch holes”. The use of the ZFS filesystem is another possibility, but it is external to MySQL and doesn’t help with caching. All these solutions are transparent, but often they also have performance and management implications. If you are using Percona Server for MySQL, you have yet another option, “column …

If the first time you heard this phrase “parent-child relationship in MySQL”, you went “Ok, anyone else got cool made up names or are we to start brainstorming now”, then this article is for you. For the uninitiated, this might not make much sense. That’s perfectly fine because you do not necessarily need it everyday.

Parent-child relationship in MySQL has to deal with establishing some hierarchal dependencies between records in a database table. In MySQL terms, it means say that “row 12 is the parent of row 14” and stuff like that. In business terms, it will mean establishing a dependency relationship between two similar entities. For example, keeping a record of all the people in a village and matching parents to their children.

So, whenever you hear that phrase, think about a real-world parent-child relationship. For the rest of this article, we are going to explore how to establish said relationships and possible …

MySQL 8.0.13 improves replication lag monitoring by extending the instrumentation for transaction transient errors. These temporary errors, which include lock timeouts caused by client transactions executing concurrently as the slave is replicating, do not stop the applier thread: instead, they cause a transaction to retry.…

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First of all, thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and Code One in San Francisco. It was a great privilege to be allowed to make a number of presentations.

All of the workbooks and scripts from the hands-on labs (HOL) and the slides from the talks have been made available at OpenWorld’s and Code One’s session catalogues. You can download the files by using the OpenWorld catalog searching for my name or the session number (see below). Click on the download icon for each of the presentations you are interested in.

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I have already blogged a couple of times about the MySQL Shell prompt. In the first blog, I wrote about how in general to configure it, and in the second blog, I showed how to install the necessary fonts to use the prompt with the Awesome and Powerline fonts.

In this blog, I will show a new feature of MySQL Shell 8.0.13 which adds support to have a line break in the prompt and still get multi line statements align correctly. I will first discuss why you may want to use the new feature, then go through the new templates using this feature, and …

Percona released a Release Candidate (RC) version of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0, the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 includes all the features of MySQL Community Edition 8.0, along with enterprise-class features from Percona that make it ideal for enterprise production environments. The latest release offers increased reliability, performance and security.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 General Availability (GA) will be available later this year. You learn how to install the release candidate software here. Please …