It’s very easy to install Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on DigitalOcean. If you’ve never used DigitalOcean before, you will find that it is user-friendly and not very expensive. For $5/month you can easily host your PMM on it, letting you monitor your simple infrastructure or try out PMM before implementing it to monitor your production environments.

Let’s prepare the DigitalOcean instance

Log in to DigitalOcean (DO) control panel and click “Create Droplet.”

Thanks to DO you can skip the boring OS setup and save time by using the Docker “One click app” in DO and the Docker image from PMM.

Note: After clicking on “Docker…” choose an instance size that accommodates your budget – PMM can run on as little as the 1GB 1vCPU instance!

Note: Scroll again!

Next step – select a nearby region …

Some years ago, Peter Z wrote a blogpost about using MySQL Sandbox to deploy multiple server versions. Last February, Giuseppe  introduced us to its successor: dbdeployer. In this blogpost we will demonstrate how to use it. There is a lot of information in Giuseppe’s post, so head there if you want a deeper dive.

First step is to install it, which is really easy to do now since it’s developed in Go, and standalone executables are provided. You can get the latest version …

In this blog post, I will show you how easy it is to set up a Percona Monitoring and Management server on Google Compute Engine from the command line.

First off you will need to have a Google account and install the Cloud SDK tool. You need to create a GCP (Google Cloud Platform) project and enable billing to proceed. This blog assumes you are able to authenticate and SSH into instances from the command line.

Here are the steps to install PMM server in Google Cloud Platform.

1) Create the Compute engine instance with the following command. The example creates an Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS compute instance in the us-west1-b zone with a 100GB persistent disk. For production systems it would be best to use a 500GB disk instead (size=500GB). This should be …

In this blog post, we’ll look at ProxySQL firewalling (how to use ProxySQL as a firewall).

Not long ago we had an internal discussion about security, and how to enforce a stricter set of rules to prevent malicious acts and block other undesired queries. ProxySQL came up as a possible tool that could help us in achieving what we were looking for. Last year I wrote about how to use ProxySQL to stop a single query.

That approach may be good for few queries and as a temporary solution. But what can we do when we really want to use ProxySQL as an SQL-based firewall? And more importantly, how to do it right?

First of all, let us define what “right” can be in this context. …

Performance Schema (PS) has been the subject of many, many recent discussions, presentations, and articles.  After its release in MySQL 5.7, PS has become the main actor for people who want to take the further steps in MySQL monitoring. At the same time, it has become clear that Oracle intends to make PS powerful with so many features and new instrumentation that old-style monitoring will begin to look like obsolete tools from the Stone Age.

This article will explain PS and provide guidance on what needs to be done in order to use it effectively.

What I am not going to do is to dig into specific performance issues or address polemics about what PS is and what, in a Utopian vision, it should be. I have seen too many presentations, articles and comments like this and they are not productive, nor are they in line with my target which is: keep people informed on how to do things EASILY.

For the scope of this …

MySQL Group Replication is here and with it comes the need to install and configure the underlying group communication toolkit that supports it: Corosync. Corosync is a well known and reliable Group Communication System that is used in such applications as Pacemaker.

In term of support, we develop MySQL Group Replication based on Corosync version 1.4.6, so this tutorial is based on this version. Regardless of this, no known problems are know to exists when using newer versions, but no extensive testing has been done on those.

Along with Corosync we also encourage the use of NSS to better secure your data that is transmitted in the group.

Installing

To install Corosync, you can rely on your packet manager for most distributions or compile it from source.

==> From the package manager

• Debian distributions

$ sudo apt-get install corosync …

At the moment, dbForge Studio for MySQL allows you to create a connection to Sphinx Search Engine. Due to technical restrictions, a warning message appears in some cases. The reason the message appears is because, there is no possibility to define that the connection happens to  Sphinx SE. We requested the Sphinx SE developers team to fix […]

From time to time we have to work with live environments and production databases. For some of us this is day-to-day job. And most of the time cost of a mistake is way higher than expected improvement especially on the databases. Because issue on the database side will affect everything else.

I heard enough war stories about ruined productions and can imagine well enough speed of DROP DATABASE command replicating across the cluster. So I’m scared to make changes in production. The more loss expected if things go wrong the more I’m going to be scared planning every change. But I still love to make improvements so the only question is how to make them safer.

This post is not intended to be a guide or best practices on how to avoid issues at all, it’s more invitation to discussion that started between me and @randomsurfer in twitter on how to avoid production failures. …

When your backup script is running for too long it sometimes causes the second backup script starting at the time when previous backup is still running. This increasing pressure on the database, makes server slower, could start chain of backup processes and in some cases may break backup integrity.

Simplest solution is to avoid this undesired situation by adding locking to your backup script and prevent script to start second time when it’s already running.

Here is working sample. You will need to replace “sleep 10″ string with actual backup script call:

#!/bin/bash

LOCK_NAME="/tmp/my.lock"
if [[ -e $LOCK_NAME ]] ; then
        echo "re-entry, exiting"
        exit 1
fi

### Placing lock file
touch $LOCK_NAME
echo -n "Started..."

### Performing required work
sleep 10

### Removing lock
rm -f $LOCK_NAME

echo "Done."

It works perfectly most of the times. Problem is that you could still theoretically run two …

If you ever get an error with MySQL client library:

php: error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.16: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

while using Percona MySQL Server 5.5 just go ahead and install Percona-Server-shared-compat package from Percona Repo:

yum install Percona-Server-shared-compat