In the world of data backup and security, physical backups play an extremely important role. Physical backup methods are faster than logical because they involve only file copying without conversion. This type of backup is suitable for large, important databases that need to be recovered quickly when problems occur.

Physical backups are the backups that consist of raw copies of the directories and files that store database contents. In addition to databases, the backup can include any related files, such as log or configuration files. Now, since backup speed and compactness are important for busy, important databases, Percona’s open source physical backup solution – Percona XtraBackup (PXB), takes into account all these aspects and benefits MySQL world with its exceptional capabilities!

This blog post will walk you through how PXB …

MySQL is an outstanding open source transactional database used by most web-based applications and is very good at handling OLTP workloads. However, modern business is very much dependent on analytical data. ClickHouse is a columnar database that handles analytical workloads quickly. I recommend you read our previous blog, Using ClickHouse as an Analytic Extension for MySQL, from Vadim to know more about this.

In this blog post, I will show you how to replicate MySQL data in real-time to ClickHouse. I am going to use the MaterializedMySQL engine for this purpose. The blog post contains the following topics.

• MaterializedMySQL Engine – Overview
• Prerequisites for the Replication
• Replication setup
• Replication testing
• Understanding ReplacingMergeTree
• What …

Schema changes are required to add new features or to fix bugs in an application. However, there is no standard procedure to make the changes in a quick and safe manner. If the changes are not made considering the necessary precautions, you may face unwanted outages on the database that can cause serious problems to your business. In this blog post, I will delve into the most important things to consider while preparing a schema change.

Table size and concurrency

When assessing a schema change, one of the most important things to consider is the table size and concurrency. For small tables, the ALTER operation usually takes a few milliseconds up to a few seconds. Here is where concurrency plays another important role: if the table has periods of low concurrency during the day and the application allows having it locked for a few seconds or minutes, …

The auto-increment feature, which generates unique values for primary key columns, is an integral part of the database’s design. With the release of MySQL 8, a notable enhancement was introduced to the auto-increment counter. Compared to MySQL 5.7, this enhancement ensures that the maximum auto-increment counter value persists between server restarts, providing enhanced consistency and reliability in data management. In this article, we will look into this enhancement, compare MySQL 5.7 with MySQL 8, and provide practical examples to demonstrate the differences.

Auto-increment in MySQL 5.7

In MySQL 5.7, the auto-increment counter works as follows: when a new row is inserted into a table with an auto-increment column, the counter increments by 1, and the generated value is used for the primary key of the inserted row. This counter value is stored in memory and is not persistent across server restarts. As a result, if the server …

This post was originally published in June 2020 and was updated in September 2023.

While there is no magic bullet for MySQL performance tuning, there are a few areas that can be focused on upfront that can dramatically improve the performance of your MySQL installation. While much information has been published on this topic over the years, I wanted to break down some of the more critical settings that anyone can implement with no guesswork required.

Depending on the version of MySQL you are running, some of the default values used in this post may differ from your install, but the premise is still largely the same.

What are the Benefits of MySQL Performance Tuning?

MySQL performance tuning offers several significant advantages for effective database management and optimization. Let’s explore these benefits in …

This blog was originally published in February 2019 and was updated in September 2023.

Web applications rely on databases to run the internet, powering everything from e-commerce platforms to social media networks to streaming services. MySQL is one of the most popular database management systems, playing a pivotal role in the functionality and performance of web applications.

In today’s blog, I’ll take a look at MySQL collation and charset settings to shed light on how they impact the performance of web applications and how to use them to effectively communicate with your users.

Understanding Character Sets and Encoding in MySQL

Character sets and encoding in MySQL play a vital role in how data is stored and retrieved in a database. A character set is a collection of characters with unique representations for each character, such as letters, numbers, and symbols, that define how data is …

This blog was originally published in November 2021 and was updated in September 2023.

MySQL server performance can sometimes be perplexing, and if you’ve ever wondered about the role of triggers in influencing your MySQL server’s memory allocation, this post is for you. MySQL triggers are a powerful tool for database administrators and developers, enabling them to automate tasks, enforce data consistency, and respond to events within the database seamlessly.

Here, we first cover the basics of MySQL Triggers, and then we take a deeper dive, exploring their impact on memory usage and providing strategies to optimize MySQL server performance.

What is a Trigger in MySQL?

A Trigger in MySQL is a database object that plays a pivotal role in database management. It is essentially a set of instructions or a program that is executed automatically in response to specific events or actions occurring within the …

This blog post will focus on failover and recovery scenarios inside the InnoDB Cluster and ClusterSet environment. To know more about the deployments of these topologies, you can refer to the manuals – InnoDB Cluster and Innodb ClusterSet setup.

In the below snippet, we have two clusters (cluster1 and cluster2), which are connected via an async channel and combined, known as a ClusterSet topology. We are going to use the below topology in all of our cases.

MySQL  127.0.0.1:3308 ssl  JS > myclusterset.status({extended: 1})
{
    "clusters": {
        "Cluster1": {
            "clusterRole": "PRIMARY", …

To reduce the backup size, save storage space, and speed up the backup and restore process, you can compress a backup with Percona XtraBackup. The XtraBackup --compress option makes XtraBackup compress all output data, including the transaction log file and metadata files, with one of the supported compression …

This blog describes how to configure systemd for multiple instances of MySQL. With package installations of MySQL using YUM or APT, it’s easy to manage MySQL with systemctl, but how will you manage it when you install from the generic binaries?

Here, we will configure multiple MySQL instances from the generic binaries and manage them using systemd.

Why do you need multiple instances on the same server?

We will do that, but why would you need multiple instances on the same host in the first place? Why not just create another database on the same instance? In some cases, you will need multiple instances on the host. 

1. You can have a host with two or three instances configured as a delayed replica of the source server with SQL Delay of, let’s say, 24hr, 12hr, and 6/3hrs.
2. Backup testing. You can run multiple instances on a server to test your backups with the correct version and configs. …