Instant ADD COLUMN for InnoDB Marko Mäkelä Wed, 10/11/2017 - 11:02

MariaDB Server 10.3.2 alpha was released this week. For InnoDB, the new features coming in MariaDB Server 10.3 include CREATE SEQUENCE which is a logical continuation of the Persistent AUTO_INCREMENT that appeared in MariaDB Server 10.2.

Perhaps one of the most important InnoDB changes coming in MariaDB Server 10.3 is Instant ADD COLUMN for InnoDB tables. The design was brainstormed in April by engineers from MariaDB Corporation, Alibaba and Tencent. A prototype was developed by Vin Chen (陈福荣) from the Tencent Game DBA Team.

What is …

Despite your very best efforts, as tables increase in size and more and more users come online, sluggish MySQL performance eventually rears its ugly head. When that happens, you may be tempted to shrug it off as part of doing business. Don’t. By understanding the mechanisms behind database slowdowns and by methodically attacking the problem, you can home in on the culprit(s) and remedy the issues in a timely manner, before your business suffers substantial losses as a result.

The purpose of this blog is to assist you in determining the cause(s) of MySQL database performance issues using a couple of built-in tools.

Why Database Performance Slows Down

It’s no secret that database performance tends to degrade over time. While it’s easy to point the finger at the number of concurrent users, table scans, and growing tables, the reality is more complex than that. The most common reason for slow database performance is …

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.3.6 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 4.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 3.3 and 3.4, and we highly recommend that you consider upgrading. More information on MEM 4.0 is available here:

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We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.2.10 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 4.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4, and we highly recommend that you consider upgrading. More information on MEM 4.0 is available here:

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Join Percona’s Product Manager Michael Coburn as he presents a Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Demonstration on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

How can you optimize database performance if you can’t see what’s happening? Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free, open source database troubleshooting and performance optimization platform for MySQL and MongoDB. PMM uses Metrics Monitor (Grafana + Prometheus) for visualization of data points. It also has Query Analytics (QAN), to help …

To operate any database efficiently, you need to have insight into database performance. This might not be obvious when everything is going well, but as soon as something goes wrong, access to information can be instrumental in quickly and correctly diagnosing the problem.

All databases make some of their internal status data available to users. In MySQL, you can get this data mostly by running 'SHOW STATUS' and 'SHOW GLOBAL STATUS', by executing 'SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS', checking information_schema tables and, in newer versions, by querying performance_schema tables.

These methods are far from convenient in day-to-day operations, hence the popularity of different monitoring and trending solutions. Tools like Nagios/Icinga are designed to watch hosts/services, and alert when a service falls outside an acceptable range. Other tools such as Cacti and Munin provide a graphical look at host/service information, and give historical …

In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the MySQL and MariaDB default configuration differences, focusing on MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.2. Percona Server for MySQL uses the same defaults as MySQL, so I will not list them separately.

MariaDB Server is a general purpose open source database, created by the founders of MySQL. MariaDB Server (referred to as MariaDB for brevity) has similar roots as Percona Server for MySQL, but is quickly diverging from MySQL compatibility and growing on its own. MariaDB has become the default installation for several operating systems (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Fedora). Changes in the default variables can make a large difference in the out-of-box …

While working on something unrelated, I came across the server status flags that are exposed to client connections by the client library. I have never used those flags myself, but as I understand they are meant to provide some context to applications and proxies which would otherwise have to do some fairly expensive things to obtain that information.

What stroke me as odd is that there is no way to see those flags from interactive sessions in the MySQL command-line client. Like applications or proxies, human beings need context, especially when multi-tasking and switching between multiple tabs or windows. That's precisely the reason why the command prompt in the mysql client can be customized via the …

While working on something unrelated, I came across the server status flags that are exposed to client connections by the client library. I have never used those flags myself, but as I understand they are meant to provide some context to applications and proxies which would otherwise have to do some fairly expensive things to obtain that information.

What stroke me as odd is that there is no way to see those flags from interactive sessions in the MySQL command-line client. Like applications or proxies, human beings need context, especially when multi-tasking and switching between multiple tabs or windows. That's precisely the reason why the command prompt in the mysql client can be customized via the …

Good news ! The MySQL & Friends Devroom has been accepted for Fosdem’s 2018 edition !

This event is a real success story for the MySQL ecosystem, the content, the speakers and the attendees are growing every year.

Fosden 2018’s edition will take place 3rd & 4th February in Brussels and our MySQL & Friends devroom will run on Sunday 4th. FOSDEM & MySQL is a love story started 18 years ago !

The committee selecting the content for our devroom is not yet created and if you want to be part of this experience, just send me an email (candidate at mysqlandfriends dot eu) before Oct 20th .

If you want to join the Committee you have to align with the following conditions:

– planning to be present at FOSDEM
– having a link with …