It’s our pleasure to announce that VividCortex now fully supports Amazon Web Services’ Aurora, a new and exciting evolution in database technology. As a fresh and high-powered alternative to MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, Aurora is sure to make waves in database services worldwide.

According to AWS, “Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability, replicating 6 copies of data across 3 Availability Zones and backing up data continuously to Amazon S3.” It’s highly scalable too: “You can use Amazon RDS to scale your Amazon Aurora database instance up to 32 vCPUs and 244GiB Memory.You can also add up to 15 Amazon Aurora Replicas across three availability zones to further scale read capacity. Amazon Aurora automatically grows storage as needed, from 10GB up to 64TB.”

Aurora has been the focus of database aficionados all …

MariaDB 10.1 not only contains tons of new features, it has also been polished to deliver top performance. The biggest improvement has been achieved for scalability on massively multithreaded hardware.

The following numbers show the throughput for a simplified sysbench OLTP benchmark on MariaDB-10.1.8 compared to MariaDB-10.0.21:

With the release of 10.1.8, MariaDB takes a next step. MariaDB 10.1 is now considered a stable release.

MariaDB 10.1 has a couple of main themes:

• Security
• High Availability
• Scalability

During the last few years there have been many request for more security features in MariaDB. Actually it’s a trend in general. Since open source software is getting more attractive all the time, more functionality is wanted in areas where proprietary software typically has been leading. This is especially true for databases. In addition data privacy is a very hot topic.

The big new thing in security for MariaDB 10.1 is a complete data at rest encryption solution. The encryption that now is in use originates from Google’s encryption patch. It has now been migrated into MariaDB 10.1. The …

A common way to implement point in time recovery capability is:

to regularly do a full backup of a database, and to save the binary logs of that database (or from its master if doing backups on a slave).

When point in time recovery is required you need to:

restore a backup, and apply the binary logs up to the point of recovery.

(Step # 2 and # b above are the ones that will be simplified

A while ago I wrote a blog post about time series database requirements that has been amazingly popular. Somewhere close to a dozen companies have told me they’ve built custom in-house time series databases, and that blog post was the first draft of a design document for it.

One of the things I said in the post was that I had no use for the “tagging” functionality I’ve seen in time series databases such as OpenTSDB. I’ve since reconsidered, although I think the functionality I now want is a bit different.

What does it mean to “tag” metrics? Typically, many time series databases let you add name=value pairs (tags) to individual time series points (observations). For example, you measure CPU usage to be 59% at 3:41PM on host inst413, and you tag this measurement as “shard=81” because inst413 holds data for shard 81. …

Recently I blogged about identifying necessary index changes when changing the character set for a MySQL database. In this follow-up post I want to talk about general schema changes that you should consider when changing your character set from latin1 to utf8, from utf8 to utf8mb4, etc. The main issue is with long VARCHAR columns and columns with columns with length limits that are enforeced in bytes rather than characters.

The manual points out the main areas where you may have trouble:

• A TINYTEXT column can hold up to 255 bytes, so it can hold up to 85 3-byte or 63 4-byte characters. Suppose that you have a TINYTEXT column that uses utf8 but must be able to …

This Log Buffer edition works it way through some of the coolest blog posts from Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL of the past week.

Oracle:

• What if I’m a developer or QA person using a copy of production database to do my work. What if my copy of production is now out of date and I want to refresh my data with the data as it is on production.
• Direct path and buffered reads again.
• Copy Data Management for Oracle Database with EMC AppSync and XtremIO.
• Little things worth knowing: automatic …

On September 21st, we released Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.25. This is the first PXC release supporting proxy-protocol that has been included in Percona Server since 5.6.25-73.0.

With this blog post, I want to promote a new feature that you may have ignored.

Let’s start with a description of the use case:

Architecture Overview:

HAProxy is configured like this:

listen 3307-active-passive-writes 0.0.0.0:3307
    mode tcp
    balance …

Join us for this live webinar on Tuesday, October 27th, led by our colleague Art van Scheppingen, Senior Support Engineer at Severalnines. Art recently joined us from Spil Games in Amsterdam, where he was Head of Database Engineering. He’ll be discussing and demonstrating the new release of ClusterControl and will be available for questions on its new features.

Register here for Asia PAC / Europe MEA timezones

Register here for Latin AMER / North AMER timezones

This is our …

Percona is glad to announce the new release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on October 15th 2015. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Based on Percona Server 5.6.26-74.0 including all the bug fixes in it, Galera Replicator 3.12, and on …