Pinterest Infrastructure engineers are the caretakers of more than 75 billion Pins–dynamic objects in an ever-growing database of people’s interests, ideas and intentions. A Pin is stored as a 1.2 KB JSON blob in sharded MySQL databases. A few years back, as we were growing quickly, we were running out of space on our sharded MySQL databases and had to make a change. One option was to scale up hardware (and our spend). The other option–which we chose–was using MySQL InnoDB page compression. This cost a bit of latency but saved disk space. However, we thought we could do better. As a result, we created a new form of MySQL compression which is now available to users of Percona MySQL Server 5.6.

JSON is efficient for developers, not machines

As a small start-up, Pinterest built and scaled its MySQL …

Percona announces the release of Percona Server 5.6.33-79.0 on October 18th, 2016. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.33, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.33-79.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. Percona Server is open-source and free – this is the …

Here is the second in a series of posts about CTEs, a new feature of MySQL 8.0, available in this Labs release. The first post ended with:

Inside the recursive CTE definition (the part in AS (…)), some syntax constraints must be respected […]

• a recursive SELECT mustn’t contain GROUP BY, aggregate functions
  (like SUM), ORDER BY, LIMIT, DISTINCT (this rule doesn’t apply to the non-recursive/anchor/seed SELECT)
• a recursive SELECT must reference the CTE only once and only in its
  FROM clause, not in any subquery.

…

MySQL Connector/Node.JS 1.0.4 was recently released as a development milestone release. This is the first version available via npmjs.com. npmjs.com is the central registry for Node.JS packages. This and potential future official MySQL packages can be found using the @mysql organisation. For this to work we had to change the package name to contain that prefix and have chosen the name @mysql/xdevapi as this package provides the implementation of our X DevAPI for Node.JS and we have a free namespace for potential future libraries as part of our Connector/Node.JS product.

Given an existing Node.JS project we can easily install the library:

$ npm install --save @mysql/xdevapi …

From our October NYC Meetup, Ronald Bradford gave a presentation on “MySQL Replication Smackdown – Evaluating current replication capabilites”. Some of the details of his presentation included:

Download PDF Presentation

• What are the common approaches to data replication?
• Why do you want to use data replication in your application?
• What MySQL offers with different replication types.
• What are the limitations of different MySQL replication.
• How to evaluate your architecture needs
• A new architecture mindset …

The Theory

Generated Columns is a feature released on MySQL 5.7. They can be used during CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements. It is a way of storing data without actually sending it through the INSERT or UPDATE clauses in SQL. The database resolves what the data will be.

There are two types of Generated Columns: Virtual and Stored. They work with:

• mathematical expressions (product_price * quantity)
• built-in functions (RIGHT(), CONCAT(), FROM_UNIXTIME(), JSON_EXTRACT())
• literals (“2”, “new”, 0)

Besides that, they can be indexed but they don’t allow …

In this blog post, we’ll explain how to update the signing key for Percona Debian and Ubuntu packages.

Some of the users might have already noticed following warning on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus):

W: http://repo.percona.com/apt/dists/xenial/InRelease: Signature by key 430BDF5C56E7C94E848EE60C1C4CBDCDCD2EFD2A uses weak digest algorithm (SHA1)

when running apt-get update.

Percona .deb packages are signed with a key that uses an algorithm now considered weak. Starting with the next release, Debian and Ubuntu packages are signed with a new key that uses the much stronger SHA-512 algorithm. All future package release will also contain the new algorithm.

You’ll need to do one of the …

In this tutorial, I will show you how to install a 'MySQL Cluster' on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). MySQL Cluster is a technology to provide high availability for MySQL Databases. It uses NDB (Network DataBase) or NDBCLUSTER as the database storage engine. MySQL Cluster is designed as multi-master ACID architecture with no single point of failure, it uses automatic sharding (partitioning) to scale out read and write processes.