User variables, even though not part of standard SQL, are great objects in MySQL. They allow to keep some “state” for the life of a session: a session can execute a statement to compute a value, store that value in a user variable, and use it in all next  statements.…

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

I think the biggest news from last week was from cPanel – if you haven’t already read the post, please do – on Being a Good Open Source Community Member: Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7. cPanel anticipated MariaDB being the eventual replacement for MySQL, based on movements from Red Hat, Wikipedia and Google. The advantage focused on transparency around security disclosure, and the added features/improvements. Today though, “MySQL now consistently matches or outpaces MariaDB when it comes to development and releases, which in turn is increasing the demand on us for providing those upgraded versions of MySQL by our users.” And …

As we close out the holiday season, let’s look at some data that tells us how to guarantee a successful Black Friday (from a database perspective).

There are certain peak times of the year where companies worldwide hold their breath in the hope that their databases do not become overloaded or unresponsive. A large percentage of yearly profits are achieved in a matter of hours during peak events. It is critical that the database environment remains online and responsive. According to a recent survey, users will not wait more than 2.5 seconds for a site to load before navigating elsewhere. Percona has partnered with many clients over the years to ensure success during these critical events. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the most responsive, stable open-source database environments in order to meet their business needs.

First Stop: Germany …

We started our series on MySQL Docker deploments by showing how to deploy and use MySQL locally with docker-compose in Docker Compose and App Deployment with MySQL. Docker-compose itself is limited to one machine and it does not solve cross-node networking or span multiple datacenters. This is a job for so called cluster schedulers, i.e. […]

Percona is extending the Percona Live 2018 call for papers deadline to January 12, 2018!

Percona’s gift to you this holiday season is the gift of time – submit your speaking topics right up until January 12, 2018!

As the year winds up, we received many requests to extend the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 call for papers. Since many speakers wanted to submit during the week that they’re planning vacations (from Christmas until New Year’s Day), we realized that December 22 was too soon.

If you haven’t submitted already, please consider doing so. Speaking at …

We’re completing our move of Percona bug tracking into JIRA, and the drop-dead date is December 28, 2017.

For some time now, Percona has maintained both the legacy Launchpad bug tracking system and a JIRA bug tracking system for some of the newer products. The time has come to consolidate everything into the JIRA bug tracking system.

Assuming everything goes according to schedule, on December 28, 2017, we will copy all bug reports in Launchpad into the appropriate JIRA projects (with the appropriate issue state). The new JIRA issue will link to the original Launchpad issue, and the new JIRA issue link is added to the original Launchpad issue. Once this is done, we will then turn off editing on the Launchpad projects.

Q&A Which Launchpad projects are affected?

• …

Galera Cluster’s automatic node provisioning simplifies the complexity of scaling out a database cluster with guaranteed data consistency. SST and IST improve the usability of initial data synchronization without the need to manually backup the database and copy it to the new node. Combine this with Galera's ability to tolerate different network setups (e.g, WAN replication), we can now migrate the database between different isolated networks with zero service disruption.

In this blog post, we are going to look into how to migrate our MySQL Galera Cluster without downtime. We will move the database from Amazon Web Service (AWS) EC2 to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Compute Engine, with the help of a relay node. Note that we had a similar blog post in the past, but this one uses a different approach.

The …

If that title looks familiar, it is because a few months ago I posted about LDAP with auth_pam and PHP to authenticate against MySQL.

The good news is that recompiling the connector for Python is a lot easier than for PHP. With PHP, the complexity was due to there being one monolithic package to recompile. The bad news is that there is a slight hitch with Python.

Skip down to the hitch and how to compile MySQLdb for use with auth_pam plugin.

As a quick reminder, here is a repeat of the background:

Background
There are two plugins that can be used. From the documentation, the two plugins are:

• Full PAM plugin called auth_pam. This plugin uses …

In this blog, we will answer questions from our webinar on Percona XtraDB Cluster 101.

Recently (7 Dec 2017) I presented a webinar about Percona XtraDB Cluster 101. Firstly, thanks to all the attendees: we had a great webinar with quite some interesting questions and feedback.

Through this blog, I’ll answer most of the questions that were raised during the webinar.

Q. How does the need for the acknowledgment from other nodes affect the speed of writes?

A. There are two parts to replication: delivering a transaction (including acknowledgment) and applying the transaction. …

…but don’t just take our word for it… DBTA Trend-Setting Products for 2018

The online industry news magazine Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) has included Percona Monitoring and Management in its roundup of Trend-Setting Products in Data and Information Management for 2018.

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