This post tries to answer some of the most popular questions I receive from customers, regarding the best practices for database proof-of-concept and migration projects.

Notes

• This document discusses best practices for database proof-of-concept projects with MySQL-compatible databases. I’ll be making some references to products offered by Amazon Web Services, because it’s the service environment I work with on a daily basis. However, the guide is written in a generic enough way that you can most likely use it for any database POC, regardless of the database engine (MySQL or not) and provider (AWS or not). I’ll often use the terms “new database” or “new product” to refer to the product you’re evaluating.
• Topics and challenges mentioned in the below recommendations do overlap. The review of a POC plan is not considered complete unless recommendations from all areas are considered and applied …

Percona announces the GA release of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.7-2 on May 29, 2017. You can download it from our download site and apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona …

Please join Percona’s solution engineer, Dimitri Vanoverbeke as he presents Online MySQL Backups with Percona XtraBackup on Wednesday, May 31, 2017 at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Percona XtraBackup is a free, open source, complete online backup solution for all versions of Percona Server, MySQL® and MariaDB®. Percona XtraBackup provides:

• Fast and reliable backups
• Uninterrupted transaction processing during backups
• Savings on disk space and network bandwidth with better compression
• Automatic backup …

As Rene wrote on the ProxySQL blog yesterday:

Although MySQL Query Cache was meant to improve performance, it has serious scalability issues and it can easily become a severe bottleneck.

This is indeed something we have observed in the MySQL team for a while.…

In the last couple of blog posts on Docker, we have looked into understanding and running Galera Cluster on Docker Swarm. It scales and fails over pretty well, but there are still some limitations that prevent it from running smoothly in a production environment. We will be discussing about these limitations, and see how we can overcome them. Hopefully, this will clear some of the questions that might be circling around in your head.

Docker Swarm Mode Limitations

Docker Swarm Mode is tremendous at orchestrating and handling stateless applications. However, since our focus is on trying to make Galera Cluster (a stateful service) to run smoothly on Docker Swarm, we have to make some adaptations to bring the two together. Running Galera Cluster in containers in production requires at least:

• Health check - Each of the stateful containers must pass …

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This post was originally published on the MySQL Support Team Blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlsupport/entry/innodb_locks_analysis_why_is on 14 April 2017.

Consider the scenario that you execute a query. You expect it to be fast – typically subsecond – but now it take not return until after 50 seconds (innodb_lock_wait_timeout seconds) and then it returns with an error:

mysql> UPDATE world.City SET Population = Population + 999 WHERE ID = 130;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

You continue to investigate the issue using the sys.innodb_lock_waits view or the underlying Information Schema tables (INNODB_TRX, …

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This post was originally published on the MySQL Support Team Blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlsupport/entry/working_around_mysql_cluster_push on 5 August 2016.

I worked on an issue recently where a query was too slow when executed in MySQL Cluster. The issue was that Cluster has some restrictions when it comes to push down conditions.

As an example of this, consider the following query using the employees sample database. The query takes a look at the average salary based on how many years the employee has been with the company. As the latest hire date in the database is in January 2000, the query uses 1 February 2000 as the reference date.

Initially the query performs like (performance is with two data …

Some of the users may have noticed that .require files do not exist anymore in the MySQL test suite.

A .require is file is used along with 'require' mysqltest command. In test cases, the command 'require' is used to ensure MTR performs certain sanity checks.…

Keeping databases running consistently and continuously is crucial to many organizations. When your site or application fails to load because of problems with your databases, you risk losing revenues—especially a business with a high traffic site which is the main source of revenues. If it happens often enough, you’ll lose not only transactions but customers.

There are many reasons why a database system may be unavailable, or at least not consistently available. It could be straightforward problems with your databases, or it could be hardware limitations. There are several potentially weak components of a database system. It’s important to know where are the potential weak points and to have a clear sense of what’s required to maintain a highly available database system.

If this concept is moderately new to you, it may be overwhelming. However, please understand that it’s achievable and learnable. You can start by focusing …

Keeping databases running consistently and continuously is crucial to many organizations. When your site or application fails to load because of problems with your databases, you risk losing revenues—especially a business with a high traffic site which is the main source of revenues. If it happens often enough, you’ll lose not only transactions but customers.

There are many reasons why a database system may be unavailable, or at least not consistently available. It could be straightforward problems with your databases, or it could be hardware limitations. There are several potentially weak components of a database system. It’s important to know where are the potential weak points and to have a clear sense of what’s required to maintain a highly available database system.

If this concept is moderately new to you, it may be overwhelming. However, please understand that it’s achievable and learnable. You can start by focusing …