Percona released a Release Candidate (RC) version of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0, the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 includes all the features of MySQL Community Edition 8.0, along with enterprise-class features from Percona that make it ideal for enterprise production environments. The latest release offers increased reliability, performance and security.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 General Availability (GA) will be available later this year. You learn how to install the release candidate software here. Please …

Recently we had a customer that had issues with a filled disk on the server hosting their Docker pmm-server environment. They were not able to access the web UI, or even stop the pmm-server container because they had filled the /var/ mount point.

Setting correct expectations

The best way to avoid these kinds of issues in the first place is to plan ahead, and to know exactly with what you are dealing with in terms of disk space requirements. Michael Coburn has written a great blogpost on this matter:

https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/05/04/how-much-disk-space-should-i-allocate-for-percona-monitoring-and-management/

We are now using …

With the exception of the three configuration variables described here, ProxySQL will only parse the configuration files the first time it is started, or if the proxysql.db file is missing for some other reason.

If we want to change any of this data we need to do so via ProxySQL’s admin interface and then save them to disk. That’s fine if ProxySQL is running, but what if it won’t start because of these values?

For example, perhaps we accidentally configured ProxySQL to run on port 3306 and restarted it, but there’s already a production MySQL instance running on this port. ProxySQL won’t start, so we can’t edit the value that way:

2018-10-02 09:18:33 network.cpp:53:listen_on_port(): [ERROR] bind(): Address already in use

We could delete proxysql.db and have it reload the configuration files, but …

The release of MySQL 8.0 has brought a lot of bold implementations that touched on things that have been avoided before, such as added support for common table expressions and window functions. Another example is the change in how AUTO_INCREMENT (autoinc) sequences are persisted, and thus replicated.

This new implementation carries the fix for bug #73563 (Replace result in auto_increment value less or equal than max value in row-based), which we’ve only found about recently. The surprising part is that the use case we were analyzing is a somewhat common one; this must be affecting a good number of people out there.

Understanding the bug

The business logic of the use case is such the UNIQUE column found in a table whose id is managed by an AUTO_INCREMENT sequence needs to be updated, and this is done with a …

Some time ago, a customer had a performance issue with an internal process. He was comparing, finding, and reporting the rows that were different between two tables. This is simple if you use a LEFT JOIN and an 

IS NULL

  comparison over the second table in the WHERE clause, but what if the column could be null? That is why he used UNION, GROUP BY and a HAVING clauses, which resulted in poor performance.

The challenge was to be able to compare each row using a LEFT JOIN over NULL values.

The challenge in more detail

I’m not going to use the customer’s real table. Instead, I will be comparing two sysbench tables with the same structure:

CREATE TABLE `sbtest1` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `k` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
  `c` char(120) DEFAULT NULL,
  `pad` char(60) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY …

In my previous blog post, I showed how to deploy Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on Linode manually. It is pretty simple, but with a little coding it can be done even more easily using StackScripts

Here’s how:

1. Click on the “Add a Linode” and pick a Linode type you want to deploy.

2. Click on the deployed Linode and then click on the “Rebuild” Link

3. Click on Deploy Using StackScripts

4. On the resulting page search for “PMM” and pick PMMServer from PerconaLab.

5. Provide the host name for new Linode, pick the root password and click on “Rebuild”

6. Boot the server.

7.  You’re done. Wait for about 5 minutes for the installation to complete, then you can see PMM interface by going to this Linode …

One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution for system monitoring. Sometimes, though, you’ll have the need for a metric that’s not present in the list of node_exporter metrics out of the box. In this post, we introduce a simple method and show how to extend the list of available metrics without modifying the node_exporter code. It’s based on the textfile collector.

Enable the textfile collector in pmm-client

This collector is not enabled by default in the latest version of pmm-client. So, first let’s enable the textfile collector.

# pmm-admin rm linux:metrics
OK, removed system pmm-client-hostname from monitoring.
# pmm-admin …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018, as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

Nearly everyone today uses some form of database in the hosted cloud. You can use hosted MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, and PostgreSQL in several cloud providers as a database as a service (DBaaS).

In this webinar, Colin Charles explores how to efficiently deploy a cloud database configured for optimal performance, with a particular focus on MySQL.

You’ll learn the differences between the various public cloud offerings for Amazon RDS including Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Rackspace OpenStack …

Recently, we initiated a new project, the Open Source Database Community Blog. One way to think of this is as an online, year round version of the Percona Live conferences. If you have a story to tell, an experience to share, or a lesson to be learned send it along. As long as it’s related to open source database software, their management and application. That’s right. Not just Percona software. Any open source database software of all formats.

Unlike Percona Live, though, we are not limited by time or space. All submissions are welcome as long as they follow some simple guidelines.

We have already had some excellent posts, and in case this is news to you, here’s a recap:

• Renato Losio wrote this succinct how-to article …