Not long ago we had an internal discussion about security and how to enforce a stricter set of rules to prevent malicious acts, and block other undesired queries.

ProxySQL comes up as a possible tool that could help us in achieving what we were looking for. Last year I had written how to use ProxySQL to stop a single query.

That approach may be good for few queries and as temporary solution. But what can we do when we really want to use ProxySQL as an SQL-based firewall? And more importantly, how to do it right?

First of all, let us define what “right” can be in this context.

For right I mean an approach that will allow us to have rules matching as specific as possible, and impacting the production system as least as possible.

To make this clearer, …

Thank you for attending my webinar on Wednesday, December 20, 2017, InnoDB Performance Optimization. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the webinar.

Are the T2 CPUs similar to the M4 series?

I would expect them to be similar. Amazon does not disclose what specific version of CPUs they use for T2 instances. More details are available here.

Delay in spinlock code is pretty old code. Need to optimize based on today’s CPU? Your views?

There have been a number of improvements to the InnoDB Spinlock code during the last few years. For example, using CPU wait …

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

Happy New Year. Here’s to 2018 being a great year in the open source database world. What is in store for us? Probably: MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB Server 10.3 as generally available. What will we see in the rest of the space? Clouds? All I know is that we move fast, and it’s going to be fun to see what unfolds.

The biggest news this week may not necessarily be database related; it focused on CPU security vulnerabilities and the potential slowdowns of your servers once the updates are applied. Please do read Meltdown and Spectre: CPU Security Vulnerabilities. Peter Zaitsev himself, got quoted in …

Update: I included the results for when PCID is disabled, for comparison, as a worse case scenario.

After learning about Meltdown and Spectre, I waited patiently to get a fix from my OS vendor. However, there were several reports of performance impact due to the kernel mitigation- for example on the PostgresQL developers mailing list there was reports of up to 23% throughput loss; Red Hat engineers report a regression range of 1-20%, but setting OLTP systems as the worse type of workload. As it will be highly dependent on the hardware and workload, I decided of doing some test myself for the …

In this blog post, we examine the recent revelations about CPU security vulnerabilities.

The beginning of the new year also brings to light fresh and new CPU security vulnerabilities. Today’s big offenders originate on the hardware side – more specifically, the CPU. The reported hardware kernel bugs allow for direct access to data held in the computer/server’s memory, which in turn might leak sensitive data. Some of the most popular CPUs affected by these bugs are Intel, AMD and ARM.

The most important thing to know is that this vulnerability is not exploitable remotely, and requires that someone execute the malicious code locally. However, take extra precaution when running in virtualized environments (see below for more information).

A full overview (including a technical, in-depth …

Percona announces the release of Percona Toolkit 3.0.6 on January 4, 2018.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools that perform a variety of MySQL and MongoDB server and system tasks too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

You download packages from the website or install from official repositories.

This release includes the following changes:

New Features:

• PT-221: Improve pt-table-sync support for …

What better way to start a new year than with a new product release?

Today we are excited to announce the 1.5.1 release of ClusterControl - the all-inclusive database management system that lets you easily deploy, monitor, manage and scale highly available open source databases - and load balancers - in any environment: on-premise or in the cloud.

ClusterControl 1.5.1 features encryption of backups for MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL, a new topology viewer, support for MongoDB 3.4, several user experience improvements and more!

Feature Highlights

Related resources

 ClusterControl Change Logs

 ClusterControl Upgrade …

In 2017 we have welcomed many new customers into the Percona fold. It’s always interesting to find out what challenges the Percona team helped them to address and how they chose their relationship with Percona. As unbiased champions of open source database software, our consultancy, support and managed services staff apply their expertise across a wide range of technologies. Here are just a few stories from the past year.

Scaling applications on Amazon RDS the right way

Specializing in on-demand transportation services, Grab needed a high-availability, high performing database engine to serve their rapidly growing application. Grab operates in over 30 densely populated …

When I consult at a company, I aim to identify issues with their database and give options on how to solve them.
However, sometimes implementing those solutions may be a more lengthy process than it needs to be and sometimes they may not be implemented at all. During my career, I have observed some reasons as to why that might happen within organizations.

Obviously, the following observations will never happen at your company. I am just writing about them so that you might notice them in other places.

1. Legacy code 
People don't like to have anything to do with legacy code. It’s painful. It’s difficult. It’s risky to change. It runs business critical functions. Worse of all, they didn’t write it. This can be a problem as often, the most cripling database issues require changes to legacy code.

2. New Technologies or Methods
People don’t like you to introduce any …

In my MySQL Parallel Replication session at Percona Live Santa Clara 2017, I talked about a bug in Write Set tracking for parallel replication (Bug#86078).  At the time, I did not fully understand what was going wrong but since then, we (Engineers at Oracle and me) understood what happened and the bug is supposed to be fixed in MySQL 8.0.4.  This journey thought me interesting MySQL behavior and