Anomaly detection sure is a hot topic. We’ve written about it ourselves a number of times, and Preetam Jinka and I just coauthored a book for O’Reilly called Anomaly Detection For Monitoring. One of the challenges, as we’ve discussed so often, is that catch-all, generic anomaly detection is hard to do.

In special cases, however, there’s often a niche use case that can be done well and is highly beneficial. Query behavior changes are an example of that, and I’m happy to announce that VividCortex now has advanced statistical algorithms running to detect important changes to your most important queries continually.

What does query anomaly detection mean? Good question! In general, a lot of anomaly detection techniques try to compare current behavior to past behavior and determine if we’re within ranges of expected behavior.

You’re probably familiar with various ways to do this, such as …

I personally have always enjoyed the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS), but nowadays they have been converted to the Ubuntu Online Summits (UOS). Attending them is not always convenient (timezone issues, might be travelling, etc.) so I watched the recorded video of a session I was interested in: MySQL & Variants in 16.04.

My key takeaways

1. Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus is an LTS release.
2. The term “cross-grade” is used a lot (it is not about downgrading/upgrading, but being able to use MySQL or MariaDB or Percona Server interchangeably)
3. It would be nice to see MySQL 5.7 in this release (for Xenial as well as Debian Stretch). From Oracle there is a new packager taking over the task (Lars)
4. MySQL 5.5 is still the default in Debian, and there needs to be upgrades tested between 5.5 to 5.7 (it looks …

Continuing on with the cloud theme, I think its worth noting that since mid-2014, Rackspace has offered MariaDB (as well as MySQL and Percona Server) in the cloud, as part of their Cloud Databases offering. It’s powered by OpenStack.

Now there is an additional “High Availability instance” being offered — this gives you up to two replicas per database instance, you have the ability to load balance reads across all replicas (pretty standard), but the cool thing to try out: failover is automatic. …

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.16, released on November 9, 2015. Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. It includes new features and bug fixes as well as continued preparation for MySQL 5.7 compatibility. Full details are below. Downloads are available here and …

Mon, 2015-11-09 14:44diptijoshi

MaxScale is an intelligent database gateway for high availability, scalability, security, interoperability and manageability beyond MariaDB and MySQL. As the gateway between client applications and backend databases, MaxScale insulates the client applications from complexities of the backend database servers and clusters.

MaxScale’s architecture is highly configurable consisting of a core and database aware plugin modules. This flexible and configurable plugin architecture of MaxScale has enabled a wide variety of use cases for the community:

• Securing your database
• Minimizing maintenance downtime
• Migrating your database
• Ensuring uptime
• Scaling your database
• Interoperating with other databases

In this blog we look at how MaxScale helps minimize database access down time for client applications. Following …

During the MySQL 5.8 Dreaming and brainstorming session at PerconaLive, someone voiced a wish for an “option to make temporary tables created by the optimizer always go to disk”. By default, MySQL creates in-memory temporary tables in the MEMORY engine. The maximum size for in-memory temporary tables is the minimum of the tmp_table_size and max_heap_table_size.…

Investigation run by Marco Tusa

CONCLUSIONS

MySQL/Galera was able to outperform Aurora in all tests — by execution time, number of transactions, and volumes of rows managed. Also, scaling up the Aurora instance did not have the impact I was expecting. Actually it was still not able to match the EC2 MySQL/Galera performance, with less memory and CPUs.

In light of the tests, the recommendations consider different factors to answer the question, “Which is the best tool for the job?” If HA and very low failover time are the major factors, MySQL with Galera is the right choice”.

READ THE FULL STORY AND INVESTIGATION

In a previous post, we discussed the error log as a source of diagnostic information for MySQL. We’ve shown examples of problems where the error log can help you diagnose issues with MySQL. This post focuses on the Galera Cluster error logs, so if you are currently using Galera, read on.

In a Galera cluster, whether you use MariaDB Cluster, Percona XtraDB Cluster or the Codership build, the MySQL error log is even more important. It gives you the same information as MySQL would, but you’ll also find in it information about Galera internals and replication. This data is crucial to understand the state of your cluster and to identify any issues which may impact the cluster’s ability to operate. In this post, we’ll try to make the Galera error log easier to understand.

This is the sixteenth installment in …

In a previous post, we discussed the error log as a source of diagnostic information for MySQL. We’ve shown examples of problems where the error log can help you diagnose issues with MySQL. This post focuses on the Galera Cluster error logs, so if you are currently using Galera, read on.

In a Galera cluster, whether you use MariaDB Cluster, Percona XtraDB Cluster or the Codership build, the MySQL error log is even more important. It gives you the same information as MySQL would, but you’ll also find in it information about Galera internals and replication. This data is crucial to understand the state of your cluster and to identify any issues which may impact the cluster’s ability to operate. In this post, we’ll try to make the Galera error log easier to understand.

This is the sixteenth installment in …

How to interpret Raw data from Windows performance counters.
Tip: An alias for Get-CimInstance is GCim and alias for Get-WmiObject is GWmi.

In the first blog post, I covered what WMI/CIM is and how to get info from there. Last I talked about was RawData counters:
Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor

Name : _Total
...
PercentIdleTime : 78061457390


Understanding RawData:By itself, a RawData value is a sample but important thing is to determine what concrete sample value actually is and how to convert it to a form we understand. In this example, MSDN tells us PercentIdleTime is a counter of type 542180608:
…