Xtrabackup is the most widely open source hot backup tool for MySQL. Xtrabackup support InnoDB and MyISAM engines.It supports both MySQL Server , Percona Server and MariaDB. This presentation covers some of the important features in Xtrabackup.

Pic Courtesy : https://www.flickr.com/photos/robbiewendt/8108744459/

In this short blog post, I will show you how you can compare current and past time series in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

Recently, a support customer shared a graph with us that compared query throughput between today and yesterday as a confirmation that optimizing their server variables improved performance.

Do you want to compare workload between today and yesterday? This week and last week? Or this month and last month? You can do this by simply duplicating an existing data source of a graph, but add a time offset so it will render past data. You can specify past offsets in (s)econds, (m)inutes, (h)ours, (d)ays, (w)eeks and even (y)ears.

Say you want to graph query throughput from a certain time period and one day before that. To do this, select the “MySQL Overview” dashboard, and then click the header of “MySQL Questions” panel. The panel menu should appear:

Click the …

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

Much is still being talked about the Meltdown/Spectre CPU security vulnerabilities. There’s an interesting Twitter thread showing performance impact on Kafka brokers. Jaime Crespo also writes about how it affects MariaDB Server 10.1.30 – Finding out the MySQL performance regression due to kernel mitigation for Meltdown CPU vulnerability. It’s worth checking out the thread for PostgreSQL too.

Something else worth thinking about, …

High availability for MySQL has become increasingly relevant given the ever increasing rate of adoption and implementation. It’s no secret to anyone in the community that the popularity of MySQL has become noteworthy. I still remember my start with MySQL in the early 5.0 days and people told me that I may not want to consider wasting my time training on a database that didn’t have a large industry adoption, but look at where we are now! One of my favorite pages to cite when trying to exhibit this fact is the db-engines.com ranking trend page where we can see that MySQL is right up there and contending with enterprise products such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

MySQL has gone from being part of the ever famous LAMP stack for users looking to set up their first website to seeing adoption from major technical players such as …

In this short blogpost, we’ll show you how to use the mysql_random_data_load tool to insert random data into tables. This is a great aide in testing when you have empty tables and need them to be populated with data. We’ve all done it manually (the INSERT INTO … VALUES … way), but that is surely a waste of time. It can add up to a lot if you need to test tables with many columns, or even worse, with foreign keys.

Before saying anything else, we would like to mention that this tool is still under development, and that it will insert random data into tables. Be aware if running it in a production environment!

mysql_random_data_load is a tool created by …

Having good historial metrics monitoring in place is critical for properly operating, maintaining and troubleshooting database systems, and Percona Monitoring and Management is one of the options we recommend to our clients for this.

One common concern among potential users is how using this may impact their database’s performance. As I could not find any conclusive information about this, I set out to do some basic tests and this post shows my results.

To begin, let me describe my setup. I used the following Google Cloud instances:

• One 4 vCPU instance for the MySQL server
• One 2 vCPU instance for the sysbench client
• One 1 vCPU instance for the PMM server

I used Percona Server 5.7 and PMM 1.5.3 installed via Docker. Slow query log was enabled with long_query_time set to 0 …

This is the third post in the series on Write Set in MySQL.  In the first post, we explore how Write Set allows to get better parallel replication in MySQL 8.0.  In the second post, we saw how the MySQL 8.0 improvement is an extension of the work done in MySQL 5.7 to avoid replication delay/lag in Group Replication.  In this post, we will see how Write Set is used in Group Replication to detect

Security of data is a top priority these days. Sometimes it’s enforced by external regulations like PCI-DSS or HIPAA, sometimes it’s because you care about your customers’ data and your reputation. There are numerous aspects of security that you need to keep in mind - network access, operating system security, grants, encryption and so on. In this blog post, we’ll give you 10 tips on what to look at when securing your MySQL or MariaDB setup.

1. Remove users without password

MySQL used to come with a set of pre-created users, some of which can connect to the database without a password or, even worse, anonymous users. This has changed in MySQL 5.7 which, by default, comes only with a root account that uses the password you choose at installation time. Still, there are MySQL installations which were upgraded from …

Cloud-based Relational Database Services (RDS) offer businesses a variety of traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) with several management and configuration options. In the Top 10 Things to Know about Amazon RDS blog, we covered Amazon RDS. In today’s article, we’ll be presenting Alibaba Cloud RDS. If you’ve been considering moving some or all of your database infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud RDS, or any Cloud RDS for that matter, there are many things to consider. Here are the top 10 things you need to know before taking the plunge.

About Alibaba Cloud RDS

Alibaba Cloud RDS, whose full name is Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for RDS, is an on-demand database service that handles some of the administrative tasks associated with managing a database, thus leaving you with more time to focus on your core business. …

In this blog post, I’ll provide an explanation why you should avoid using the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement.

The SQL statement “create table <table_name> as select …” is used to create a normal or temporary table and materialize the result of the select. Some applications use this construct to create a copy of the table. This is one statement that will do all the work, so you do not need to create a table structure or use another statement to copy the structure.

At the same time there are a number of problems with this statement:

1. You don’t create indexes for the new table
2. You are mixing transactional and non-transactional statements in one transaction. As with any DDL, it will commit current and unfinished transactions
3. CREATE TABLE … SELECT …