Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 update: tutorials have been picked, and the schedule/press release should be announced by next week. We’ve (the committee) rated over 300+ talks, and easily 70% of the schedule should go live next week as well.

There’s a lot happening for FOSDEM this week — so expect a longer report of some sort next week.

A friend, Yanwei Zhou, DBA at Qunar in China, gave an excellent presentation in Chinese on how they use Percona Toolkit. …

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL Connector/Python 8.0.6-rc is the first release candidate version
of the MySQL Connector Python 8.0 series. This series adds support for
the new X DevAPI. The X DevAPI enables application developers to write
code that combines the strengths of the relational and document models
using a modern, NoSQL-like syntax that does not assume previous
experience writing traditional SQL.

To learn more about how to write applications using the X DevAPI, see
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/. For more information
about how the X DevAPI is implemented in MySQL Connector/Python, and its
usage, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/dev/connector-python.

Please note that the X DevAPI requires MySQL Server version 5.7.12 or
higher with the X Plugin enabled. For general documentation about how to
get started using MySQL as a document store, …

In order to improve observability and manageability of MySQL Group Replication (GR), we enhanced its instrumentation in MySQL 8.0.4. With these goals in mind, we have extended the usage of Performance Schema (P_S) from this plugin to the included Group Communication System (GCS) module as well as its submodule eXtended Communications (XCom) which are responsible for all communication involved in the dissemination of transactions to other MySQL instances.…

First of all, if you want a guide on how to deploy MySQL in Oracle Cloud, then the best place to start is here.

So, what are we going to do here?

• Create an Oracle Storage container to keep our backups safe.
• Run a MySQL Enterprise Backup from on-premise 5.7 MySQL (GPL or Enterprise) streaming to our Oracle Storage container.
• Create an Oracle Cloud MySQL instance initiated from the previously backed up instance.

What data do we have:

• An e-mail address that you signed up to Oracle MySQL Cloud Service with.
• An IdentityDomain.
• You might also have a Data Centre assigned, as this can be chosen when you sign up.

And now, let’s go through how to get our data into the cloud and into a running MySQL instance:

To make things simpler, …

Percona recently released Percona Server with MyRocks as GA. You can see how Facebook explains wins they see in production with MyRocks. Now if you use Percona repositories, you can simply install MyRocks plugin and enable it with ps-admin --enable-rocksdb.

There are some major and minor differences when comparing it to typical InnoDB deployments, and I want to highlight them here. The first important difference is that MyRocks (based on RocksDB) uses  …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.7.0. (PMM ) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB 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.

This release features improved support for external services, which enables a PMM Server to store and display metrics for any available Prometheus exporter. For example, you could deploy the postgres_exporter and use PMM’s external services feature to store PostgreSQL metrics in PMM. Immediately, you’ll see these new metrics in …

The Aurora hash join feature for relational databases has been around for a while now. But unlike MySQL Block Nested Loop algorithm, an Aurora hash join only caters to a specific number of use cases. When implemented with the optimizer properly, they can provide great benefits with certain workloads. Below we’ll see a brief example of a quick win.

This new feature is available in Aurora lab mode version 1.16. Because this is a lab feature, it’s important to make sure to test your queries before upgrading, especially if you are looking to scale up to the new R4 instances before the Superbowl to avoid hitting the same problem I discuss below.

When lab mode is enabled and

hash_join

  is ON, you can verify the optimizer feature from the

optimizer_switch

 variable:

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL Connector/Java 8.0.9-rc is the first Release Candidate
of the 8.0 branch of MySQL Connector/J, providing an insight into
upcoming features. It is suitable for use with MySQL Server versions
5.5, 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0. It supports the Java Database Connectivity
(JDBC) 4.2 API.

This release includes the following new features and changes, also
described in more detail on

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/connector-j/8.0/en/news-8-0-9.html

MySQL Connectors and other MySQL client tools and applications now
synchronize the first digit of their version number with the (highest)
MySQL server version they support.
This change makes it easy and intuitive to decide which client version
to use for which server version.

As always, we recommend that you check the “CHANGES” file in the download
archive to be aware of …

Today MySQL Cluster 7.6.4 DMR is out. This new version contains some very interesting
new developments in the area of checkpointing.

When I developed the original NDB algorithms in the late 90s the computer I had access to
had 2 CPUs, 1 GByte of memory. At the time we were aiming at 10.000 updates per second.

So with average row sizes of 100 bytes this meant that we changed 1 MByte per second.
The local checkpoint algorithm was designed to be executed once per about 5 minutes.

So this meant that most of the database would be changed at high loads. So the
checkpointing algorithm writes the entire database. This means that a lot of updates
are merged together in the checkpoint.

This algorithm has been used now in NDB for 20 years and it still works fine.

Now HW is developing in a number of ways.

1) Memory is getting larger and …

MySQL Cluster 7.6.4 DMR is out.

This new version contains a number of goodies.

1) Local checkpoint algorithm have been rewritten
The new checkpointing is designed to scale to at least 16 TBytes of DataMemory sizes
Checkpoints will be much faster, this decreases recovery times significantly
Table fragments that are not updated will not need any new checkpoints written
Checkpoint size on disk is significantly decreased

2) MySQL Cluster Configurator (MCC, Auto Installer)
MCC is significantly improved. Particularly for setups where you
have external computers either on-premise or in the cloud.

3) New cloud feature
In the cloud with availability domains/zones it is possible to have
10x difference between latency inside an AD compared to between
ADs. To run MySQL Cluster in a cloud region with synchronous
replication between …