Temporary Tables handling in MySQL has a somewhat checkered past. Some time ago, my colleague Przemek wrote a post about differences in the implementations between versions of MySQL. If you are looking for the differences in implementation, that’s a perfect place to check.

In this post, I’d like to focus on Session Temporary Tablespaces, InnoDB on-disk internal temporary tables that come to play when a query requires storing more data than tmp_table_size or TempTable engine allocated more than …

MySQL allows changing the location of the general log and the slow query log while the server is running by anybody having the SYSTEM_VARIABLES_ADMIN privilege to any location, including appending to existing files. In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.28-19 we introduced a new system variable, secure-log-path, that can be used to restrict the location of these log files to avoid accidents or possible data corruption attacks.

When somebody with the system variables admin privilege changes these variables, the server runs a few sanity checks. Unfortunately, these checks are quite minimal, and only verify that the specified file is writable by mysqld.

Compared to this, other variables specifying write-related file and directory names are either read-only during the runtime of the server (such as datadir, tmpdir, or log_error), or have additional …

As you are probably aware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6 or EL 6 in short) officially reached “End of Life” (EOL) on 2020-11-30 and is now in the so-called Extended Life Phase, which basically means that Red Hat will no longer provide bug fixes or security fixes.

Even though EL 6 and its compatible derivatives like CentOS 6 had reached EOL some time ago already, we continued providing binary builds for selected MySQL-related products for this platform.

However, this became increasingly difficult, as the MySQL code base continued to evolve and now depends on tools and functionality that are no longer provided by the operating system out of the box. This meant we already had to perform several modifications in order to prepare binary builds for this platform, e.g. installing custom compiler versions or newer versions of various system …

Earlier last week, Oracle released their Q2 releases series. Unlike previous releases, backward compatibility has now been broken with previous versions of MySQL.

MySQL 8.0.29 extended the support for the online DDL algorithm INSTANT. Prior to 8.0.29 only adding columns to the end of the table was supported.

In 8.0.29, this functionality was extended to allow the INSTANT algorithm the ability to add columns in any position of the table as well to drop columns. This new functionality required the redo log version to increase and new redo log types to be added, thus making it incompatible with older versions of the MySQL server and also older versions of Percona Xtrabackup. Please note that an in-place minor version downgrade of …

In the last quarter of 2021, AWS released Aurora version 3. This new version aligns Aurora with the latest MySQL 8 version, porting many of the advantages MySQL 8 has over previous versions.

While this brings a lot of new interesting features for Aurora, what we are going to cover here is to see how DDLs behave when using the ONLINE option. With a quick comparison with what happens in MySQL 8 standard and with Group Replication.

Tests

All tests were run on an Aurora instance r6g.large with a secondary availability zone. The test was composed of:

        Four connections

• • #1 to perform DDL
  • #2 to perform insert data in the table I am altering
  • #3 to perform insert data on a different table 
  • #4 checking the other node operations

In the Aurora instance, a …

When one is responsible for promoting application development from Dev through the various environments such as QA, UAT, etc., through Production, it is often useful to ensure that configurations in test environments are comparable to the final production environment.  This is especially true with systems where a team of DBAs manage the servers.

Obviously, the difference in performance could be due to differences in hardware, storage, networking, software configuration, etc.  The question is how does one quickly and efficiently find the differences without having to run a lot of different commands and compare the output.  Fortunately, our Percona Toolkit has a couple of utilities that can make this much easier.  When you are tasked with supporting large numbers of servers, efficiency is paramount and this is where the toolkit can really help you!

You can find more information on the Percona Toolkit here: …

Ingress is a resource that is commonly used to expose HTTP(s) services outside of Kubernetes. To have ingress support, you will need an Ingress Controller, which in a nutshell is a proxy. SREs and DevOps love ingress as it provides developers with a self-service to expose their applications. Developers love it as it is simple to use, but at the same time quite flexible.

High-level ingress design looks like this: 

1. Users connect through a single Load Balancer or other Kubernetes service
2. Traffic is routed through Ingress Pod (or Pods for high availability)
   • There are multiple flavors of Ingress Controllers. Some use nginx, some envoy, or other proxies. See a curated list of Ingress Controllers here.
3. Based on HTTP headers traffic is routed …

Last month I performed a review of the Percona Operator for MySQL Server which is still Alpha.  That operator is based on Percona Server for MySQL and uses standard asynchronous replication, with the option to activate semi-synchronous replication to gain higher levels of data consistency between nodes. 

The whole solution is composed as:

Additionally, Orchestrator (https://github.com/openark/orchestrator) is used to manage the topology and the settings to enable on the replica nodes, the semi-synchronous flag if required. While we have not too much to say when using standard Asynchronous replication, I want to write a few words on the needs …

KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) is an open standard developed by OASIS (Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for the encryption of stored data and cryptographic key management.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.27 and Percona XtraBackup 8.0.27 now include a KMIP keyring plugin to enable the exchange of cryptographic keys between a key management server and the database for encryption purposes. The procedure to use them with HashiCorp Vault Enterprise is described below.

Install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise

We will first install Hashicorp Vault Enterprise on Ubuntu Linux “Bionic” and then enable …

A little bit ago, I released a blog post comparing the backup performance of different MySQL tools such as mysqldump, the MySQL Shell feature called Instance Dump, mysqlpump, mydumper, and Percona XtraBackup. You can find the first analysis here:

Backup Performance Comparison: mysqldump vs. MySQL Shell Utilities vs. mydumper vs. mysqlpump vs. XtraBackup …